How much space is required for a zettabyte?

Question

With today's technology, how big would a building have to be to hold a zettabyte of "seconday memory?" ( aka hard disk space)

Answer 1

A standard 42U rack full of Apple XServe RAID (I'm using it for comparison because everyone should be able to find it easily not because of any preference for Apple) holds 98 terabytes. This is about 100 TB. A ZB is 1024 EB which is 1048576 PB. It would take about 10 Racks to equal 1 PB. So it would take 10485760 Racks to have about a ZB. I think a Rack is about 6 square feet.

So (with no space in between racks) about 62914560 square feet (or over 1444 acres) to hold a ZB of hard drive space.

That's if I'm figuring right. I may not be right. The figure of 98 TB to a rack is one of Apples figures, not mine.

Answer 2

2^70 or 1024^7

There is nice page on WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte