IBM is currently building a 120 petabyte drive that will eventually comprise 200,000 conventional HDDs.




Indeed, the 120 petabyte drive will be capable of storing 24 billion five-megabyte MP3 files or 60 backup copies of the Web (150 billion pages) from the Internet WayBack Machine.
"A 120-petabyte storage array would easily be the largest I've encountered," said Conway, who noted that the largest arrays currently available weigh in at approximately 15 petabytes. 


Unsurprisingly, IBM engineers refined a number of techniques to enable the seamless operation of such a large storage system, including cooling the drives with circulating water rather than fans, allowing a supercomputer to keep working at almost full speed even if a drive breaks down (by automatically writing data to a replacement) and running a fresh file system known as GPFS - which spreads individual files across multiple disks.
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