[notacoward]

Even 5EB would be a stretch for 2013. 5ZB is flat-out impossible. As another poster points out, that's years' worth of total worldwide drive shipments (most sources put it at less than 1ZB in 2013). Large buyers are further constrained by the fact that their demand can cause price spikes even at much lower percentages of the total. Not even No Such Agency has that kind of budget. The Utah facility also isn't physically big enough for that figure to hold. I work on large storage systems at one of those large buyers, and I've toured one of the several data centers where ours live. NSA's Utah data center looks to be on approximately the same scale, not orders of magnitude bigger. It's further plagued by power problems, which is another constraint on total size.

So I looked into that quote from the NSA director. What was actually said, apparently, was that the center was designed to hold up to 5ZB, not that it actually did. That seems to be a design based on some extremely optimistic assumptions about future drive density, power consumption, and cost. Needless to say, those assumptions were a bit silly at the time and have only seemed more so in retrospect.

P.S. It looks like TechCrunch came to almost exactly the same conclusions that I did, for very similar reasons. https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/24/the-nsas-massive-utah-data...