[tbrownaw]

16 million terablocks, or 8 billion terabytes.

Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available.

Some random search results say the global hard drive market is around an eighth of a billion units, but of course much of that will be smaller sizes.

So that should be physically realizable today (well, with today's commercial technology), with only a few years of global production.

[Dylan16807]

> 16 million terablocks, or 8 billion terabytes.

To be clear, the first quote was talking about 2^64 bytes, and you're talking about 2^64 blocks.

Edit: Though confusingly the second part talked about 2^128 blocks.

Also these days I'd assume 4KB blocks instead of 512 bytes.

[tbrownaw]

> To be clear, the first quote was talking about 2^64 bytes

That's 16 exabytes. Wikipedia cites a re:invent video to say that Amazon S3 has "100s of exabytes" in it.

So it not only could theoretically be done, but has been done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3

[throw0101d]

> Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available.

For the record, 44TB drives have been announced in March 2026:

* https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/stories/articles/seagate-deliv...

[extraduder_ire]

SSDs have outclassed hard drives in density for a while now. Kioxia claims their LC9 is over 245TB in capacity, announced July 2025.

[throw0101d]

How much does one 245T LC9 cost, and much much do (245T÷44T=5.5=) six Seagates cost?

I have a bunch of NVMe enclosures that generate 750W of heat when going full blast, and 600W when completely idle. How heat does the equivalent number of HDDs generate when working/idle?