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by chebucto 4735 days ago
The headline of TFA says "Millions Of Trillions"

The headline of TFA's TFA (the source article) says

"La DGSE collecte ainsi des milliards de milliards de données".

That translates to 'millions of millions' pieces of data, or on the order of 10^12 (trillions in short scale) pieces of data.

2 comments

No 'milliards de milliards' translates to billions of billions. So that would be 10^18
Could this be translated as "billions and billions" or "billions upon billions"?
Literally it says billions of billions, but in context it most likely means billions upon billions.
Why? Petabytes seems like a more likely order of magnitude than gigabytes, doesn't it?

eta: From the article: "capable of managing dozens of petaoctets of data, in other words dozens of millions of gigaoctets"

Actually 'zillions' is probably the most accurate translation.
No. The correct translation is "billions of billions"
Ack, you're right. My French teachers would not be impressed.
Hi, I wrote this post. I see that everyone is as confused as I was with the "milliards de milliards" :) "Millions of trillions" is the right way to say it in English I believe (if you don't want to go over trillions). I edited the headline a couple of minutes after publishing to correct my mistake. Sorry!
google says

10^18 bytes in petabytes = 888.17 petabytes

or basically a million terabytes if you round up.

basically 3 million 1TB hard drives in raid 5 (1M x 3). you can probably fit a 500 1TB 2.5" drives into a single rack if you really try, and 2,000 racks can fit easily into warehouse-sized facility. (grid of 100 x 20 racks)

I was sure milliard was billion and now you are making me doubt
In French: 1 milliard = 10^9. And 1 million = 10^6. So bnegreve is right when he says 10^18.

A milliard is a billion.