r/theydidthemath • u/QueenViolets_Revenge • 16d ago

[request] how much data would a hard drive of that size hold today?

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u/kimi_rules 16d ago

The term "hard drive" is generalized and covers other storage mediums. These days servers are running SSDs for fast IOPS and HDD as cold storage.

An SSD in that container would handily fit above 50 Petabytes with modern commercial SSDs.

In the lab with advanced storage, probably an exabyte.

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u/Squigglificated 16d ago

The Micron 6600 SSD has a capacity of 176.9PB per rack. source

The box in the picture looks like it could fit 2 or 3 racks. So either 353.3PB or 530.7PB

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u/kimi_rules 16d ago

Ah man, technology advances so fast, that's almost half a exabyte with SSD alone.

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u/Sakazuki27 15d ago

Imagine if in 50 years this size is considered Standard what kind of game worlds will fit in

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u/promptmike 14d ago

We're fast approaching the point where the limiting factor is not storage, but hours of human labour. The size of game worlds will be determined by what percentage of the animating can be done by AI, vs the percentage that still has to be done by humans.

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u/cleanandanonymous 15d ago

Nah. Just more ad tech stuffed in.

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u/Additional-Dot-3154 16d ago edited 16d ago

With modern commercial/lab only magnetic disk storage devices you could also fit a gigantic amount of storage here not only on with ssd's. Probably higher as the Seagate Ironwolf Pro 30TB has 30TB of storage and personally i have never seen a commercially available 30TB ssd.

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u/cleanandanonymous 15d ago

Just more room for ad tracking tech.

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u/Narwhalking14 16d ago

Oh my god it could hold examon

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u/anon21801 16d ago

How many loisbytes?

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u/atomicshrimp 16d ago

Especially difficult as you have to put it in the truck one way and it won't go, then turn it around and try the other way and it still won't go - then you turn it around and find it fits the first way.

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u/thepitredish 15d ago

Me with every USB stick.

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u/Financial_Leopard_55 16d ago edited 16d ago

It was the size of "two large refrigerators". Average size of a large refrigerator - "175-190cm tall" "70-91cm wide" "70-75cm deep", multiply depth by 2 and take their medians to get the dimensions 187.5cm tall, 80.5cm wide, 145cm deep.

187.5 * 80.5 * 145 to get 2,188,593.75 cm³

A standard hard drive (3.5-inch HDD) has physical dimensions of 14.7 cm, 10.16cm, and 2.61cm, and the average capacity purchased by consumers today is 1TB to 2 TB. Finding the volume to be 14.7 * 10.16 * 2.61 we get 389.80872cm³. Dividing by 1.5 we get roughly a terabyte for every 259.87248 cm³.

2,188,593.75 / 259.87248 gets us roughly 8,422 so roughly 8422 TB or 8.422 petabytes. This would be an incredibly slow hard drive though.

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u/Old_Croc_or_Bust 16d ago

You could get a more accurate answer if you included more digits after the decimal.

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u/lysianth 16d ago

probably more accurate if he used something with storage more dense than a 3.5 hdd, but theres a solid chance that comment is from a 10 year old repost or some shit.

m.2 can get 8tb. I can't find the exact dimensions of that, but max specs for m.2 is 30mm by 110mm with a maximum thickness of 3.5mm per side plus 1.6mm for the pcb.

So 30mm by 110mm by 8.6mm = 28.38 cubic cm for 8tb. divide by 8 and we get a terabyte for every 3.55 cubic cm.

So using the estimated size above, we get 4,377,187.5/28.38 = 154,234.94 TB per double fridge.

So around 154.23 Petabyte.

I'm not sure if something that storage dense would be usable, but i'm certain if you dedicate 1/3rd of the volume to making it work you could still get 100 petabytes in 2 fridges worth of space.

LTO-9 tapes are 224mm by 97mm by 301mm for 45 tb for 145cm per tb, higher than above.

maybe there's tapes with higher storage density, but lets move on

SD micro can get 2tb. The format technically supports 128tb, but i couldn't find that available (i'd lose my mind if it existed, thats crazy) If all we have to do is store it, then 15 x 11 x 1 mm = .165 cc. We divide by 2 and we get .0825 cc per tb. 4377187.5 cc /.0825cc per tb = 53056818tb = 53 Exabyte's. Which is crazy, but as mentioned before, not usable in this format.

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u/Ohjay1982 16d ago

Next question is how much would that cost?

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u/jankeyass 16d ago

He said a hard drive not a ssd

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u/Nutzpdx 16d ago

First guy answered what OP wanted to know, second guy answered what everybody else wanted to know

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u/sinker_of_cones 16d ago

Can it run doom?

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u/senzzzz 16d ago

Isn't that the dimensions for 4 "large refrigerators"?

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u/Financial_Leopard_55 16d ago

Yeah I fixed it 😭

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u/Positive_Conflict_26 16d ago

Why go by average of capacity?

The highest density drive I can think of is the 245.76TB kioxia ssd.

An E3.L form factor is 7.6x1.68x14.22cm=181.56cm³.

So 4,377,185.7÷181.56=24,108 drives (no need for decimal point since we aren't cutting any drives in half).

So 24,108×245.76TB=5,924,782.08TB

Or 5,924.78208PT or 5.925HB if you pack the drives as densely as possible.

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u/nonchip 16d ago

OP asked about "hard drive"s, that's short for "hard disk drive", as in "spinning rust circles".

also i think you might have a typo there, at "5,924.78208PT"?

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u/burnsniper 16d ago

Just fill it with ssds. It would be fast and hold tons.

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u/ChemicalRain5513 16d ago

This would be an incredibly slow hard drive though.

But you would not build it like that, it would be a giant RAID array of smaller disks.

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u/cjmpeng 16d ago

I didn't read the article about the IBM drive so I don't know what they said about specifications but I'm pretty sure the seek, read, and write speeds of this device, while adequate for the time, were nothing to write home about.

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u/Flynn_Kevin 16d ago

Can you update the math?

That hard drive pictured had 50x 24 inch platters.

The average hard drive today has 4x 3.5 inch platters, but for argument sake let's go with a 10 platter enterprise drive.

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u/ghost_desu 16d ago

I forgot people still buy 1-2TB drives lmao. For any kind of business application like this it would be 16TB drives, and they would be pretty damn fast with the right RAID setup

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u/Aesvek 16d ago

or used much faster and smaller ssds it wouldn't be slow if in raid though but it would be half it's size

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u/nonchip 16d ago edited 16d ago

OP asked about "hard drive"s, that's short for "hard disk drive", as in "spinning rust circles" (as opposed to "floppy disk drive").

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u/these_metal_hands 16d ago

Follow up question:

If someone simply typed out 'data' on to A4 paper, front and back, how much data could be represented on paper taking up the same physical space that this 5MB hard drive takes up?

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u/No_Damage4861 16d ago

I bet you're hoping this reply was the answer to your question.

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u/these_metal_hands 15d ago

You bastard. I really was.

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u/hunter4756 15d ago

A sheet of paper can hold 2.12kb of data

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u/lminer123 15d ago

Yah at like 12 point font single sided. Crank it down to 2-4 point, widen the margins, and use both sides and you could get 100kb pretty easy. That’d mean a ream of paper would be like 50mb. And that’s if you just used 1’s and 0’s, if it was words it would technically represent more data when read by a computer

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u/JohnnyKarateX 15d ago

They make iPhones with 1 TB of storage. That’s 200,000x the space that 5 MB is and the whole phone fits in my pocket. That hard drive that needs a crew to move was likely for a computer that had its own campus.

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u/Aesvek 8d ago

i think you don't know what ur talking about mate.