from the how-about-just-archiving-the-5pct-that's-worth-keeping? dept.
Servers around the world could soon face a massive data storage crunch, thanks to the "mind-blowing amount" of information people store digitally every day:
Researchers from Aston University say the global datasphere — the total amount of data worldwide — will increase by 300 percent within the next three years. Currently, all of this data sits in banks of servers stored in huge warehouses (data centers).
Unfortunately, the answer to creating more space in "the cloud" is not just to build more server warehouses. The Aston team says data centers already use up 1.5 percent of the world's electricity every year. That makes endlessly building new facilities just for massive servers an unsustainable practice.
With that in mind, scientists are now working on creating new data storage surfaces which are just five nanometers in width. That's about 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair! At the same time, they'll be able to increase data storage capacity on digital devices — since there will likely be no stopping the amount of information people store digitally every second of every day.
[...] "Increasing the efficiency of existing technologies will significantly reduce the need for costly, environmentally damaging construction of new 'mega data centers.' The next three years will be crucial. The global datasphere is predicted to increase to 175 zettabytes, with one zettabyte being approximately equal to one billion terabytes," [researcher in materials chemistry Dr. Amit Kumar] Sarkar, concludes.
Related: Liquid Cooled HDD Study Touts Greater Reliability, Lower TCO
Related Stories
Putting spinning rust in liquid might seem risky, but sealed helium drives were used:
Immersion cooling specialist Iceotope has published a study sharing its findings in the wake of a series of tests completed at one of Meta's (Facebook) data centers. The study looked carefully at the pros and cons of precision single-phase immersion cooling in businesses that use high-density data storage servers. Iceotope asserts that its results were "conclusive" in demonstrating this cooling methodology is a superior solution when compared to air cooling, as well as other forms of liquid cooling such as cold plates, tank immersion, or two-phase immersion.
[...] In the tests, a standard air-cooled commercial storage system with 72 HDDs and supporting components was re-engineered to work with Iceotope's precision single-phase immersion cooling. Specifically, the modified system used a dedicated dielectric loop connected to a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger and pump. Single-phase cooling is much simpler than dual-phase - where the coolant boils from liquid to gas, travels into a condenser and then flows back into the system (hence dual-phase). Instead with single-phase, the coolant just flows around the hotter and cooler areas of the loop, doing its job without any phase change.
Four main observations were made by the Iceotope testing team. Firstly, the 72 HDDs showed very little variance in temperature (just 3° C) wherever they were located in the server array. It is important to highlight that the storage array used hermetically sealed helium-filled HDDs. Secondly, the liquid could climb in temperature to an easily manageable 40°C with no impact on reliability. Thirdly, the power consumption of the cooling system was <5% of the system total. Lastly, it was noticed that the single-phase precision cooling was virtually silent and vibration free.
According to Seagate, 90% of cloud storage still uses mechanical magnetic storage technology. Note that Iceotope sells this cooling technology, so take the results with a grain of salt.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday December 23, @06:12PM
https://xkcd.com/908/ [xkcd.com]
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23, @06:25PM (2 children)
That's news to me. My "mind blowing amounts of data" sit on storage devices on my shelf, among others. Not one iota of it (that I'm aware of) sits on someone else's servers. I suppose this is about morons putting their personal files (lives?) in the "cloud." --- despite being warned about that being a bad idea by those in the known when the trend began.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24, @05:19PM
I think they have misspoken. It's not "your data" they're talking about but all of the data about you.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday December 25, @06:02PM
Me, too. I have over ten tb storage on my home network. Of course, Microsoft and Amazon and Google and everybody else wants me to rent space from them instead of drives that cost less than fifty bucks a tb. I remember when 10mb was huge.
Of course, this doesn't apply to you or me, it concerns folks that use truly gargantuan amounts of data, like astrophysicists or the folks at CERN.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday December 23, @07:31PM (3 children)
Why? Why are we storing this much data? What are we doing with it? And this energy consumption for storage doesn't count towards the energy used for actual processing like AI or virtual words like Meta is making.
I can't think of one good reason to triple the amount of data we're storing. If anything, we should be working to reduce the amount of data we're storing. We should be making it more targeted.
And although I believe the trends that the article talks about, 300 percent in 3 years sounds very questionable. I'm tempted to call BS on the article.
Well, that's my two cents.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Friday December 23, @09:02PM
Meta/Palentir/Zuckerberg will have their marketing data! Your lives are their profit.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fliptop on Friday December 23, @09:58PM
Question: When was the last time you looked through a photo album, or watched home movies on VHS?
Another question: When was the last time someone thrust their phone in your face and said, "Look at this!"?
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday December 25, @06:04PM
You've never heard of CERN? Or radiotelescopy? or NASA?
Are you lost, little one?
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday December 23, @08:29PM (1 child)
" ... That makes endlessly building new facilities just for massive servers an unsustainable practice."
Not necessarily. As long as we keep pumping out an equal or greater amount of new electricity this shouldn't be an issue. But for various reasons we don't. But it would probably be in all our interest if electricity was more or less limitless and nearly "free" or so dirt cheap nobody would care. Some sanity checks required etc but normal usage for normal people (not idiots running cryptofarms in their bedrooms). More good then bad would probably come from it.
I wonder when it would be worth running some kind of algorithmic dupe check on all the crap/precious things people store "in the cloud". After all do we really need umpteenth duplicates of a lot of things. After all it's not new and unique content that is increasing multi-fold, to some degree it is but then the great duplication begins, per year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23, @08:43PM
Yeah, except that eventually the planet won't be able to dissipate all the added heat
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday December 23, @09:22PM (4 children)
I'm as guilty as anyone. But: do much data is actually trash. Take 100 photos, get one nice pic and...the other 99 never get deleted. Download a movie, watch it, gate it, and...never delete it.
Storage is cheap. Why bother cleaning up? Not saying that's good, but it is reality.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday December 23, @09:36PM
I think it would help if consumers were encouraged/incentivized to review online photos/videos from earliest to latest and delete/mark the crummy ones, and mark their albums with temporary "finished checking here" and permanent "done checking this year" markers. That way you're always ratcheting the start marker forward, since newly taken photos/videos can show up in many categories, but will never show up in earlier years.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday December 24, @02:41AM (2 children)
Except I keep all those old useless files on old useless hard drives, still healthy but no longer large enough to bother keeping in live storage. My boxful of old drives in the closet impacts no one's future storage. (But have occasionally been useful to me.)
Methinks the data they're concerned about multiplying is all that personal data intended to track every move we make for the benefit of advertising and surveillance. So the real question is, why do we give a shit if they run out of storage? Why are they allowed to store it in the first place? They've long since overstepped what should be their sane bounds.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Saturday December 24, @03:09AM (1 child)
Yeah, this. They won't be happy until they have 3D live video of your every move, 24 hours a day, combined ideally with scans of brain and nervous system activity and other biological information, cross referenced with every other person and organization you interacted with that day, probably along with some projections of your likely future behavior from each moment. There must come a point though where they have more than enough data to oppress everyone or advertise to them, beyond which it's basically useless. Aren't we already past that point?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday December 24, @04:07AM
+10 Insightful. Absolutely agreed.
Saw somewhere that ~90% of storage media (meaning HDD and SSD) sales are for one form or another of corporate/cloud storage. I'm thinkin' it might be more like 99%.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by negrace on Friday December 23, @11:22PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPgkSH2050k [youtube.com]
I do not want to live in a world where someone else
makes the world a better place better than we do.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23, @11:30PM
So who is using this storage? Maybe not users, but corporations gathering more and more information about users? Tracking their movements, recording their actions, writing them in profiles and then buying and selling these profiles?
These companies literally buried the common vector animation format only because it must be needed to hire an entire dev team to build a simple vector animated site.
There should be some kind of regulations related to data and profiling processing, and there must be some kind of open auditing interface. Yes, this will introduce a legislative chaos at the borders, and this may be also very useful to make these corporations not sniff user's actions, data and even spoken words like a vacuum.
In 2004-2009, people put a raw photo dumps from their cameras to their blogs. They had a size like 50-100 current Instagram posts. Most of Internet users had a few hundred MBs of ISP hosting, and there were hosting providers using "hosting for an ad" principle. There was less lossless data, but there was a P2P to unload centralized services when transferring them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Saturday December 24, @12:41AM (1 child)
So their answer is more tech for more storage. Well if that happens and the new tech is both feasible and economical, then great.
But the alternative is simply DONT PUT AS MUCH SHIT EN TEH CLOUDS.
What should happen is maximum storage allotments/quotas will decrease and more space will require paid accounts. But "cloud" hosting providers will resist this as long as they can monetize the crap users upload. Hell, take that away, and all "cloud" hosting will suddenly cost $$$. This stuff isn't really free, you know.
I used to maintain an office file server and mange quotas for each users home directories. This was on NT 4 with tiny little SCSI hard drives (20 or 40GB total? I forget exactly, some NTFS compression was in use). Users had to learn to take responsibility for the sizes of their files, and prioritize what they put in there.
These days I deal with some people that use the Microsoft One Drive service to store all their office documents. Which, they always refer to as "the cloud". They never think of it as a third party service, it just magically exists and comes with Windows. They know nothing about file size, and they never delete anything. (They also had all of their computers configured to use one persons Microsoft One Drive account, with desktop syncing enabled. What a mess).
Aught to force them to use 1.44mb floppy disks. That would teach them the value of file size. :P
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday December 24, @01:08AM
If these wasteful storage habits result in us getting $10/TB SSDs or holographic discs, then I'm all for it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday December 24, @02:26AM
A billion terabytes isn't that much.
Over the last 60 years of my life, I've collected almost two terabytes myself. I don't trust the "cloud", especially not for media I've bought and paid for. Yes, the company I bought it from stores it for me on their servers, but a lot of companies come and go faster then I live and die.
So multiply two gigabytes by about 7 billion people (or is that too new these days) and you end up with about 14 billion terabytes.
If you backdate the 175 zettabytes three years from now to now, undoing the 300% increase (which is a factor o 4), you get about 45 zettabytes. In the same order of magnitude as the 14 zettabytes I came up with.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Saturday December 24, @02:53AM
Y'know, I often used to tell myself that making money from creating software ought to be one of the most environmentally-friendly professions--well, excluding positive ecological conservation work. A piece of software is just flipping some bits on computers that already existed, right? So if you don't go nuts with it, it should barely waste any energy at all, compared to say working at a factory turning oil into single-use plastics, or building sprawling housing developments for investors.
How naïve of me! Now software is thrown together using enormous bloated libraries. The piles of crap that go into most modern web pages and the number of servers they "need" to connect to is quite horrific. And I love a realistic video game as much as the next dude but do they really have to each now occupy around 5-10% of my entire hard drive space?! Don't forget all those ads. All those stupid, annoying, hi-res video ads. As if that wasn't enough we had even more ludicrous acts of waste like coin mining. And all of this multiplied billions upon billions of times because there's just so fucking many of us consuming all this stupid shit.
There won't be a technological singularity. 1.5 percent of the world's electricity! Humanity's consumption of resources is expanding faster than just about any of us can fully comprehend. I don't know whether it's 5 years or 50 years away, but things are going to get very, very messed up.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday December 24, @08:24AM (2 children)
Parkinson's law [wikipedia.org] says that work stretches and grows to fill the time allotted for its completion. The same applies to bureaucracy and the amount of budget it has.
Data fills the space you offer it. If you offer unlimited space, data will grow without limits.
Any resource that is offered without cost will be consumed. Why would it be different for storage space?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Saturday December 24, @08:41AM (1 child)
This has been known for as long as there has been data storage. The saying "Data expands to fit the space provided" was told to me back when a 4GB hard drive was the newest densest storage, by a guy who was already near retirement at the time, so I can only assume the phrase has been in use before then.
It kind of applies to anything. Provided unlimited supply, demand increases, if for no other reason that the human energy required to cleanup, delete and generally curate the data is higher than the need to free up storage.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Booga1 on Sunday December 25, @05:26PM
This is the issue with my "junk data." I can spend another $100 on storage, or I can take the time to review all the really mundane, out of focus, boring pictures and free up space when I still haven't filled up the drive. The time and effort to clean up the data will take me way longer than it'll take to earn another $100. So, I guess I'll just let it sit there until I fill up the drive, then spend the $100 for another couple of terrabytes to dangle off the back of the computer.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Saturday December 24, @12:22PM (2 children)
A truly massive HD 14 Terabyte (internal or external) is like 200 bucks. I don't know anyone besides myself that stores that amount of data. The cloud is extremely overrated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24, @05:31PM (1 child)
That's perfect, right up until that piece of physical hardware fails. So you buy two drives, keep them in sync and up to date, or buy some sort of NAS. But wait, how do you protect that data from physical damage on site such as a fire, etc.? Now you need a third drive that you periodically retrieve from off-site, update it, and take it back off site.
Or you could just pay someone to provide you with a service that handles all of these needs.
I guess it just depends on how valuable your data is to you.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday December 25, @03:12PM
And then your Internet connection goes down, right when you need it, or they lose your data forever and you don't have your own copy? Do you know how expensive Azure is? They charge more for the Free stuff that actually works, like NFS.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].