can the internet ever become full?

BobQ

kinger101 wrote: »

Siloxane (aka silicone) can also be converted to silica. I wonder how many TB are potentially located in Pamela Anderson's chest?

There will be far more storage in the DNA in her chest than the silicon. (1gm DNA =450 Exobytes):D

kinger101

BobQ wrote: »

There will be far more storage in the DNA in her chest than the silicon. (1gm DNA =450 Exobytes):D

And I suspect many more exabytes have been "downloaded" onto her chest as well during her career.

zagubov

It's not so long ago that servers were for sale that could contain the entire internet.Don't most search engines have a copy of it as well (obviously not on one computer of course)?

Pete9501

Whilst storage might not be a problem, having programs that can read documents or even the storage media. I have some small tapes at work which we can't access because someone throw the computer out years ago :cool:

How will you read a word perfect document in 100 years time? Will a CD or hard drive last that long? You might not think that is important, but how about flight records for a 747 for example. The aircraft could be flying for 40 years and you will want to keep those records.

prowla

kabayiri wrote: »

You don't need silicon to build storage.

Power and cooling requirements demanded by these large server farms; that does present an issue; but it's really an engineering challenge.

The question should be : what do we do with the management of stale data and information?

I once ran a tool on a client's shared servers. There was a latency figure of something like 97%. Put in basic terms, 97 out of 100 documents/files rarely changed, and it would be difficult to assess if they were still relevant/current without expensive examination.

How much of internet content is already out of date?

You do need silicon to build storage - disk drives have logic boards.

prowla

chris_m wrote: »

I remember when I bought my first hard drive, somewhen around 1991. It cost a shade over £200 and was a 40Mb drive - which I had to partition because DOS could only handle 32Mb maximum partiton size. I loaded all my software and thought, "Ooh, I'll never fill all that up". Famous last words

Nowadays, you can't even get a computer to run on such little memory let alone storage. You can buy drives 25,000 times larger for around 1/6 the price of that 40Mb drive, or larger still for an even smaller proportional price. Good job too, the amount I have stored now

40 megabits is not a lot.

Sapphire

Pete9501 wrote: »

Whilst storage might not be a problem, having programs that can read documents or even the storage media. I have some small tapes at work which we can't access because someone throw the computer out years ago :cool:

How will you read a word perfect document in 100 years time? Will a CD or hard drive last that long? You might not think that is important, but how about flight records for a 747 for example. The aircraft could be flying for 40 years and you will want to keep those records.

Yes, that is a problem. In the past paper, vellum, stone and other records were kept that survived hundreds of years and contained masses of valuable information about the past, including things like letters written by authors and historical figures, illustrations, maps and loads of hand-worked documents. I think a lot of what is written on computers is going to be lost (not that anyone is particularly bothered about this today, from the looks of things).

GunJack

It never ceases to amaze me how much data individuals keep, and how little they access it (e.g. someone above mentioning filling TB of space and still running out), how much of that will ever be looked at more than once??

I find people (individuals, not businesses) tend to store things "because they can" rather than because they need to...and then panic when their hdd starts to fail and surprise surprise they don't have a backup because they thought £50 for an external hdd was too expensive to be worthwhile....

getmore4less

In the old days data storage was on a hierarchy.

Connected live data was in 300MB disc storage units about the size of a small washing machine. There would a rows of them

The secondary storage was on 300MB magnetic tapes in a big machine that could pick a tape(from 100s) and transfer to the disc, when finished with it would go back on the tape.

Tertiary storage was tapes that were picked by hand and put in the big machine. If you needed the data you ordered it in advance of running your programs.

Now most data is available with quite low latency.

Sometimes a refresh strategy is best you move everything to a new standard every few years and stop using/archiving old formats.

How many could access DAT tape, 5" floppy, even some early hard drives will be difficult.

getmore4less

zagubov wrote: »

It's not so long ago that servers were for sale that could contain the entire internet.Don't most search engines have a copy of it as well (obviously not on one computer of course)?

Vast warehouses spread around the world full of data storage arrays.