An Exabyte sounds like a lot

Recently I was watching Ocean’s 13 which passed the time reasonably pleasantly. There was a supposedly awesome computer which our handsome heroes had to overcome called “The Greco”. Apparently it stored its data “in a field of Exabytes”.

This got me thinking about all the different storage metrics and the fact many of us can get them confused. I decided to pop the following list down for your viewing pleasure…

Name	Abbreviation	Amount
bit	b	Fundamental unit of data storage
Nibble		4 bits
Byte	B	8 bits
Kilobyte	kB	1024 Bytes
Megabyte	MB	1024 Kilobytes
Gigabyte	GB	1024 Megabytes
Terabyte	TB	1024 Gigabytes
Petabyte	PB	1024 TB
Exabyte	EB	1024 PB

An Exabyte is seriously huge! If you take it that DVD quality video requires a bandwidth of around 5Mbits/s plus about 0.45Mbits/s for its audio that gives a total bandwidth of 5.45Mbits/s. This equals 0.68MB/s. Now an Exabyte is a million million MB so divide that by 0.68, then by 60, then by 24, and finally by 365 and the answer is:

An Exabyte would be able to store 46,632 hours of playback time!!

Comments

Anonymous said…

So, when in 2007 the first 1TB harddisk was announced, this computer already had a million of them connected :)

19 August 2015 at 19:46

Where are SCANPST.EXE and/or SCANOST.EXE?

I sometimes have to deal with customer computers whose Outlook PST or OST files have become corrupted. Very often the fix is to run SCANPST.EXE on the offending PST/OST file. However, every time I go to do this I forget where the two executable files are. Here is where they are on a Vista machine running Office 2007: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12 I hope this helps.

Unable to Extend Volume because the Windows Recovery Partition is in the way

I had to increase the space allocated to a customer's WSUS server VM that had run out of capacity and was keeling over. So I powered off the VM, added the extra capacity to the virtual hard disk, powered it back on, and went into Disk Management to extend the C: drive partition. However, I discovered that because the Windows Recovery Partition was in between the C: partition and the new unallocated space (similar to the image below which I've copied from Woshub.com ), I was unable to do an "Extend Volume" job. The solution was to move the recovery partition. This involves disabling it, deleting it, extending your partition as required, and then re-creating the recovery partition and enabling it. Here are the steps involved: Disable existing recovery partition: You will need to disable the existing Windows recovery partition. To do this, run this command from an admin command line/PowerShell: reagentc /disable If you get the error message "REAGENTC.EXE: Operati...

Resolve WSUS Server issue that gives "Cannot save configuration because the server is still processing"

This is a pretty infuriating error and can sometimes crop up as a result of running a "wsusutil reset" command. First of all, give the server some time, and then a bit more... but you've probably already done this. These steps may help to resolve the situation: - Install Microsoft SQL Management Studio (free download) - Run SQL Management Studio and start to connect to the WSUS database - Enter this in the "Server Name" box: \\.\pipe\MICROSOFT##WID\tsql\query - Expand the "Databases" tree - Right-click on "SUSDB" and choose "New Query" - Paste this query in: UPDATE tbSingletonData SET ResetStateMachineNeeded = 0 - You should see a message like "1 row affected", which is good - Quit SQL Management Studio - Open "Services" and restart the "WSUS Service" - Now, open WSUS

Artifact Weblog

Search This Blog