Updates... and numbers...

A quick post about something I just read about... Apparently, the NSA just put up a new datacenter, and the scale the NSA is using to measure the capacity of the datacenter's storage is in Yottabytes.  So, the order goes something like 1 Kilobyte is 1,000 bytes... then 1 Megabyte is 1,000 Kilobytes... then it goes Giga... Tera... Peta... Exa... Zetta... and now Yottabytes!

So, what can you store in a Yottabyte?  Well, the answer is somewhere along the lines of the capacity of every civilian hard drive ever purchased... and then some.  It's enough space to store about 166 Terabytes of information for every person on the planet...  or store about 2.38 Million hours of telephone conversations (at 128kbps... which phone could easily be recorded at 64kbps.) for every person on the planet.

And, now for a little speculation... I have a feeling the datacenter can store multiple Yottabytes of information.  Not to mention the datacenter is probably built to allow for expansion.

Here is a table to help visualize the size of a Yottabyte:

1,000 Bytes	= 1 KiloByte
1,000,000 Bytes	= 1 MegaByte
1,000,000,000 Bytes	= 1 GigaByte
1,000,000,000,000 Bytes	= 1 TeraByte
1,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes	= 1 PetaByte
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes	= 1 ExaByte
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes	= 1 ZettaByte
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes	= 1 YottaByte

  Also take note that the milky way galaxy is approximately 95 Yottameters across...

  Anyway... other than just being freaked out by the size of the newest NSA datacenter, I'm doing pretty good.