A 120 petabyte drive is being built by researchers at IBM's Almaden, California, R&D lab. It will be the largest data repository ever built, and will comprise 200,000 hard disk drives strung together.
The giant data container is expected to store around one trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.
A 120 petabyte drive could hold 24 billion typical five-megabyte MP3 files or comfortably swallow 60 copies of the biggest backup of the Web, the 150 billion pages that make up the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine.
More: Technology Review (via Cliff Pickover).
