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Cake day: September 14th, 2023

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  • There is a much cheaper way that doesn’t use hard drives. It uses magnetic tapes, LTO-9 tapes specifically.

    Each LTO-9 tape cassette can hold up to 45TB of data (compression is used to store it on the raw 18TB).

    An LTO-9 tape drive can cost $10,000. Assuming you get the full 45TB per tape, you’ll need 2223 LTO-9 tape cassettes to store 100PB. Assuming you buy in bulk, you can get each tape cassette for $150 which puts you at $333,450 for the tapes.

    Since the tapes don’t use power when not in use, this concludes the total cost. None of this accounts for storing all 2223 tapes or maintenance to ensure data is still intact on them but this comes out to $343,450 in total to store 100PB using magnetic tapes. While the cost is much cheaper, it’s much harder to access the data as it’s not immediately available since you have to fish out the drive you need and plop it into the tape drive then wait for it to read.


  • Let’s assume you have all hard drives and in a setup with absolutely zero redundancy in case a drive fails.

    We’re using the Seagate Exos X24 (24TB) drive which is roughly $700 each brand new.

    You’ll need 4167 of them to store 100PB. Which puts you at $2,916,900 just for the drives.

    Let’s assume you already have the enclosures, racks, and servers for a small datacenter ready to go.

    A drive can use 4-9w of power when spinning so assuming all drives are active (to ensure quick data access and data repair) that’ll be roughly 27086w for all the drives at 6.5w per drive. Every month (30 days), that is 19502kWh of electricity used. 40 years is roughly 349,680 hours so that comes out to around 9,471,433kWh used.

    Assuming you get some damn good electricity rates at $0.12USD per kWh, it’ll cost $1,136,572 to run just the drives.

    So in total, assuming you already have a datacenter with the capacity to install all the drives that runs on absolutely zero power, you’ll spend roughly $4,053,472 over the course of 40 years.

















  • Gonna defend gen z a bit here. Unlike older generations, gen z was raised in a large part only on locked down, touch screen interface devices like smartphones and tablets. These devices are designed to not be tampered with, designed and streamlined to “just work” for certain tasks without any hassle.

    If you only have a smartphone or tablet, how are you supposed to learn how to use a desktop os? How are you supposed to learn how to use a file system? How are you supposed to learn how to install programs outside of a central app store? How are you supposed to learn to type on a physical keyboard if you do not own one?

    I worked as a public school technician for a while and we used Chromebooks at my school system. Chromebooks are just as locked down if not more locked down than a smartphone due to school restrictions imposed via Google’s management interface. Sure they have a physical keyboard and “files” but many interfaces nowadays are point and click rather than typing. The filesystem (at least on the ones I worked with) were locked down to just the Downloads, Documents, Pictures, etc. directories with everything else locked down and inaccessible.

    Schools (at least the ones I went to and worked at) don’t teach typing classes anymore. They don’t teach cursive classes. They don’t teach any classes on how to use technology outside of a few Microsoft certification programs that students have to chose to be in (and are awfully dull and will put you to sleep).

    Gen Z does not have these technology skills because they largely do not have access to anything that they can use to learn these skills and they aren’t taught them by anyone. Gen Z is just expected to know these skills from being exposed to technology but that’s not how it works in the real world.

    These people aren’t dumb as rocks either like so many older people say they are. It’s a bell curve, you’ll have the people dumb as rocks, the average person, and the Albert Einsteins. Most people here on lemmy fall closer to the “Albert Einstein” end of the tech savvy curve so there’s a lot of bias here. But I’ve had so many cases where I’ve met Boomers, Gen X, and Millennial who just can’t grasp technology at all.

    Also, before someone says “they can just look it up on the internet”, they have no reason to. What’s the point of looking up these skills if they cannot practice them anywhere? Sure, you’ll have a few that are curious and interested in it but a vast majority of people have interests that lie outside of tech skills.

    Tl;dr Gen Z is just expected to know technology and thus aren’t taught how to use it or even have access to non-locked down devices.


  • In small datasets, the speed difference is minimal; but, once you get to large datasets with hundreds of thousands to millions of entries they do make quite a difference. For example, you’re a large bank with millions of clients, and you want to get a list of the people with the most money in an account. Depending on the sorting algorithm used, the processing time could range from seconds to days. That’s also only one operation, there’s so much other useful information that could be derived from a database like that using sorting.