IBM is building the largest hard drive in the world with capacity 120 petabytes

Last Updated on Sunday, 22 April 2012 20:07 Written by Administrator Monday, 12 September 2011 21:40

IBM is building the largest hard drive that has a capacity of 120 petabytes, or 120 million gigabytes. Currently, the largest hard drive capacity in the world is 15 petabytes. If the project is completed, then IBM would have a hard drive with the largest capacity in the world.

Certainly, it’s not a single hardisk. IBM made the hard drive with series of 200 thousand hard drives that are combined into one supercomputing facilities. Implementation of projects is done in CA Research Lab, Almaden, San Jose, California, USA.

This giant hard disk can contain a trillion files and can run more complex simulation systems, such as weather and climate modeling. Megaserver was made for an anonymous client who plans to create a simulation for phenomenon of real events.

To support this project, IBM developed a variety of hardware and new software techniques. Coolers are made for this giant hard drive using the circulation of water, not like the cooling fan in general hard drive.

When a single disk dies, the system pulls data from another drive and write to disk replacement slowly, so that the supercomputers can continue working. If it’s more failures occur among nearby drive, the drive will rebuild speed for the process and avoid the possibility of other failures, such as the deletion some data permanently accidentally.

IBM uses a standard tactic to save multiple copies of data on different disks, and it employs the new improvements that allow a supercomputer to keep working at nearly full, even when the drive is damaged.