Yottabyte equals a million billions of gigabytes. some info on the Utah NSA site.

[trumad]

The $2 billion data center being built in Utah would have four 25,000 square-foot halls filled with servers, as well as another 900,000 square feet for administration.

It will use 65 megawatts of electricity a year , with an annual bill of $40 million, and incorporates a $10 million security system.

Since 2001, the NSA has intercepted and stored between 15 and 20 trillion messages, according to the estimate of ex-NSA scientist Bill Binney. It now aims to store yottabytes of data. A yottabyte is a million billions of gigabytes.

According to one storage firm’s estimate in 2009, a yottabyte would cover the entire states of Rhode Island and Delaware with data centers.
When the Department of Energy began a supercomputing project in 2004 that took the title of the world’s fastest known computer from IBM in 2009 with its “Jaguar” system, it simultaneously created a secret track for the same program focused on cracking codes.

The project took place in a $41 million, 214,000 square foot building at Oak Ridge National Lab with 318 scientists and other staff. The supercomputer produced there was faster than the so-called “world’s fastest” Jaguar.

The NSA project now aims to break the “exaflop barrier” by building a supercomputer a hundred times faster than the fastest existing today, the Japanese “K Computer.” That code-breaking system is projected to use 200 megawatts of power, about as much as would power 200,000 homes.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/16/nsas-new-data-center-and-ultra-fast-supercomputer-aim-to-crack-worlds-strongest-crypto/

[ljm2002]

1. Very informative...

...thanks for posting.

Although you might want to edit your title. How do people confuse Nevada with Utah?

[trumad]

5. updated---and thanks

[onehandle]

2. That's a lot of porn. nt

[backscatter712]

3. It takes a lot of computing power to drive Google for Tyrants. n/t

[BlueToTheBone]

4. We (Arkansas) had a young soldier go missing from that facility

in 2012. They never found his body and although he was packed to leave and be transferred with his stuff in his room and his truck was abandoned on the side of the road, they declared him awol and that was the end.

[reformist2]

6. It's obvious they aren't just collecting "metadata"... they're collecting *everything*.

[trumad]

8. Bingo

Think of it in simple terms... Meta is like storing text on your computer hard drive...very minimal storage requirements--- but try to download a dozen movies--- bye bye hard drive space...

I know that's a pretty high level description--- but it describes why NSA needs Yottabytes.

and no---its not to download movies....

[reformist2]

9. Exactly. We could probably store the list of everyone's phonecalls for a year on a couple of laptops

[snooper2]

16. ROFL

[cbdo2007]

14. It isn't very efficient to track/store 99.9% of data so I'm guessing 99.9% of information

is nowhere on their radar. Something would have to make you an outlier to even be on the long list of people they're looking at and truly collecting data from.

[Vincardog]

26. That does not address the 4'Th amendment probation on illegal searches. It is Unconstitutional

for the government to gather and keep all this "private" data.

[cbdo2007]

28. Then why are you bringing it up?

It also doesn't address gun control or abortion. I wasn't responding to anything regarding the 4th amendment, so it makes sense that my point doesn't address the 4th amendment either.

[Vincardog]

29. I bring it up because you seem to accept them doing it. It is not right and we must stop it.

[cbdo2007]

30. At no point in my post do I "seem to accept them doing it".

I was just commenting that it is inefficient for them to collect "everything" from a data perspective because 99.9% of data is irrelevant to anything they're looking for.

[lumberjack_jeff]

15. Agree. n/t

[Progressive dog]

7. At this time the cost of a yottabyte storage estimated at $100 trillion

The tech wizards at Gizmodo have calculated the cost of a yottabyte of storage at $100 trillion. They estimate that by 2019, price will drop to only $1.9 trillion, less than one year of the US federal budget.[link:http://gizmodo.com/5557676/how-much-money-would-a-yottabyte-hard-drive-cost|

[struggle4progress]

18. $100 trillion is only about 7X current US GNP! And for just pennies on the dollar more,

we could build spy-centers on Mars!

[Progressive dog]

20. OKay

I'll bet we'd have money left over.

[hughee99]

23. They can build a facility for this, and they don't have to start with a yottabyte,

it's scalable. The can add more each year.

By 2019, they won't need a data center the size of two states to store it either. In 2002, they made the 137gb drive, by 2005, it was 500gb, by 2011, it was 4TB, all in the same physical size drive.

[Progressive dog]

27. the Forbes article was copied poorly from Wired

Right now the entire internet handles .0003 yottabytes per year.
In 2019, based on past improvements in technologies, 1.9 trillion dollars is the predicted cost of a yottabyte of storage. That is only 1000 times the claimed cost of the facility. If we assume cost and size have a linear relationship, in 2019 we'd only need a building taking up 4% of one state.
Let's think about this a little more clearly. As of 2011 we could store 4tb in 2005 we could store 500gb. By your estimate we have improved by a factor of 8 in 6 years. In 2011, we would need 250,000,000,000,000 hard drives to store a yottabyte. In 2035 we would only need 64,000,000 of them.
We'd be down to about a million in about 2047.
But the Forbes article doesn't say that.
The original Wired article does.

[Cirque du So-What]

10. Yep, 'atza lotta data

but how many analysts would it take to actually analyze it? It'd be like trying to measure the size and mass of every grain of sand on Pismo Beach.

[trumad]

11. Well they got 80 billion

and that will hire a lot of folks...

[Cirque du So-What]

12. I'm thinking more like a *LOT* of folks

So now we find that the scale of data collected goes far beyond what they originally admitted to, but that billions are thrown at trying to extract something meaningful out of it. Seems like an exercise in futility to me. Not only is this illegal, but now it's wasteful to boot.

[Nimajneb Nilknarf]

13. How much power is "65 megawatts of electricity a year"?

[Progressive dog]

21. Can't be answered, no such amount

Power is rate of energy usage so I assume they meant 65 megawatts.
Somehow I think you knew that.

[Nimajneb Nilknarf]

22. 65 Megawatt-Hours per year would make sense.

It's shocking how common poor journalistic writing has become in two centuries.

[Progressive dog]

25. the article at wired doesn't say what the Forbes journalist thinks it does

The wired article has a picture showing electric usage as 65 megawatts and never claims that it is being built to store a yottabyte. Right now the internet moves .0003 yottabytes per year.
That journalist couldn't be trusted to plagiarize someone else and get it right.

[wandy]

17. You know what's real spiffey.....

When you think about data storage you think of this........

When you thought about spy planes, you didn't even know about this.....

until it was obsolete!

[Nye Bevan]

19. Well they're not going to be running out of space for their iTunes libarary anytime soon (nt)

[KittyWampus]

24. That's some sweet pork right there...