In case you missed it, there was an interesting article published in Friday’s Oregonian by McClatchy reporter Greg Gordon on the databases that the NSA is using to record and store domestic emails and phone calls (presumably cell phones at this point). You can see the article here.
According to Gordon, the databases necessary for this amount storage are huge and he identifies one in Utah as being in “yodabytes” which he associates with Star Wars’ Yoda. Actually, it’s “yottabyte”, but either way, it truly is a lot of storage.
So… what’s a yottabyte? According to Wikipedia, it is a septillion bytes and provides us with this visual:
“To store a yottabyte on terabyte sized hard drives would require a million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island. If 64 GB microSDXC cards (the most compact data storage medium available to public as of early 2013) were used instead, the total volume would be approximately 2,500,000 cubic meters, or the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza.”
That, truly is, a lot of emails.
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