Re:NSA to store yottabytes of surveillance data in Utah mega...
by electromagnetic on Monday November 02, 2009 @01:00AM
(#916281)
I'm actually glad the comments here are a debate on the technological aspects and there's little commentary here on whether this is right or wrong. This kind of commentary is exactly where HN should be and often is, I'd like to take the time to point out to everyone who regularly bemoans HN is turning into reddit: it clearly isn't!
I find the CG rhetoric to be aged and irrelevant. The paranoia is so prevalent they sound like two kids smoking up in a dorm room, they use no explanation and cite no information for the paranoia than 'its the man'. It's pathetic. It's a tech website and there's barely even a passing mention of the technological feasibility of this project, and what examination of the feasibility they have is very weak and based on poor assumptions.
The assumption that the NSA will have thousands of HDD permanently running is absurd. Quite literally 1 cubic meter of 50GB blu-ray discs easily stores ~2.75 petabytes of data at an expected lifespan of 10-100 years (this is based on pure physical dimensions alone, and not storage dimensions). A single 100 disk stack of 50GB BR discs should store ~4.8TB of data. This makes the mass storage solely dependent upon write capability rather than size requirements.
I find the CG rhetoric to be aged and irrelevant. The paranoia is so prevalent they sound like two kids smoking up in a dorm room, they use no explanation and cite no information for the paranoia than 'its the man'. It's pathetic. It's a tech website and there's barely even a passing mention of the technological feasibility of this project, and what examination of the feasibility they have is very weak and based on poor assumptions.
The assumption that the NSA will have thousands of HDD permanently running is absurd. Quite literally 1 cubic meter of 50GB blu-ray discs easily stores ~2.75 petabytes of data at an expected lifespan of 10-100 years (this is based on pure physical dimensions alone, and not storage dimensions). A single 100 disk stack of 50GB BR discs should store ~4.8TB of data. This makes the mass storage solely dependent upon write capability rather than size requirements.