That’s actually smart can you imagine getting 5000 yotta size drives, you’ve just made S3 obsolete, you can comfortably fit all of YouTube on one drive. You could power the world’s storage needs for the next 50 years.
If anyone's curious I did some very rough maths based on quick googling (5.6μm thick, 960m long tape being 30Tb) that you'd get around 40.82Zb of storage for a 1km diameter tape. (≈0.04Yb)
A Yb would need to be around 5km diameter, unless there's a higher density storage available, I didn't look that deep into it.
To calculate the size of a tape drive needed to back up one yottabyte (YB) of data, let’s first clarify what a yottabyte is. A yottabyte is equal to 1024 bytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Modern high-capacity tape drives, such as the LTO (Linear Tape-Open) series, have a capacity of around 18 terabytes (TB) of uncompressed data per cartridge, and they can reach up to 45 terabytes with compression. For simplicity, let’s use the uncompressed capacity of 18 TB per cartridge for our calculations.
Therefore, the number of terabytes in a yottabyte is:
1 YB = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes / 1,000,000,000,000 bytes per TB = 1,000,000,000,000 TB
Next, we calculate the number of tape cartridges needed:
Number of cartridges = 1,000,000,000,000 TB / 18 TB = 55,555,556 cartridges
To give a sense of physical size, an LTO tape cartridge is approximately 102 mm x 105 mm x 21 mm in dimensions. If we consider just the storage space without any additional hardware or space for accessibility, we can make a rough estimate of the volume required.
Volume of one cartridge = 102 mm x 105 mm x 21 mm = 224,910 mm³ = 0.00022491 m³
Total volume for all cartridges:
55,555,556 cartridges * 0.00022491 m3 = approx 12,500 m3
This is a very rough estimate and doesn’t include space for the drives themselves, any necessary infrastructure, or cooling systems. To put it in perspective, 12,500 cubic meters is about the volume of five Olympic-size swimming pools.
So, a tape drive system to back up one yottabyte of data would require a massive number of tapes, occupying a significant amount of physical space.
Until you attempt to turn it on and realize you need several mid sized country's worth of power and a massive cooling facility...
Though the political power of being the OWNER of that facility could possibly swing it into possibility.
Shit, what's the processing power on this shit? If it just gives me a bigger box of the same modern tech, then the extra travel time of the electronics being huge would actually DECREASE processing speed compared to a smaller drive system...
Well actually it wouldn’t too bad, given 20 TB drives, you would need 50 million drives to make one yottabyte, therefore for 5000 yottabytes, you would need 250 billion drives. Each 20 TB drive costs about $380, one yottabyte would cost 19 billion dollars. Or for all 5000 yottabytes, $95 trillion although if you are going to buy 250 billion disk drives I imagine they might give you a bit of a discount.
If you were to put each drive end to end. You would be able to create a road 36.7 million km which is a ridiculous amount of road to construct so let’s say you were in a space ship, it would take two light minutes to travel that distance.
Sorry i meant that amount of drives total - it had nothing to do with how big data size wise they were. Like 10 yottas of SSDs were just created and dumped onto the world.
The first uses of prefixes in SI date back to the definition of kilogram after the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. Several more prefixes came into use, and were recognised by the 1947 IUPAC 14th International Conference of Chemistry before being officially adopted for the first time in 1960.
The most recent prefixes adopted were ronna-, quetta-, ronto-, and quecto- in 2022, after a proposal from British metrologist Richard J. C. Brown. The large prefixes ronna- and quetta- were adopted in anticipation of needs for use in data science, and because unofficial prefixes that did not meet SI requirements were already circulating.
Bringing an additional 5 septillion dollars (5x1024 ) into circulation would reduce the value (buying power) of the currently existing 2.26 trillion dollars so much that $1 would be worth 0.0000000000452 cents. Talk about inflation...
On the other hand, you would be in possession of 99.9999999999548% of all dollars in the world.
Just hope the US doesn't adopt the peso or something
In the mobile clicker game egg inc (which you might have gathered I’m a huge fan of) we use the same system to describe the orders of magnitude on our earnings bonuses (basically the account level). We even extend past yotta and go Xenna, Wecca, Venda, and Uada.
I feel like 5000 yottadollars might create a physics problem that would probably make the money itself not terribly useful anymore. Even if you go digital I'm pretty sure it would just cause your bank account to crash every time anyone looked at it..
So, 5000 yottadollars would be $5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or $5 septillion dollars. You'd have enough money that a trillion (the spots I bolded) would be a rounding error on a rounding error on a rounding error. You'd be a trillionare compared to a trillionare.
But what if I put most of the gold somewhere in space, but keep enough on earth to buy and develop a rocket that can go into space, scoop up some gold whenever I need it, and return to base?
And yes I know this is a stupid question. But I think Sci Fi. And in Sci Fi, everything is possible!
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u/twankyfive 5d ago
Yillions of dollars. It's a really big number you don't know because it goes to a different school.