Several media reports claim that the NSA’s Utah data center may ultimately be able to store data on the scale of yottabytes because, you know, they think they’re totally going to need yottabytes. To put this into perspective, a yottabyte would require about a trillion 1tb hard drives and data centers the size of both Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Plus, a trillion hard drives is more than a thousand times the number of hard drives produced each year. In other words, at current manufacturing rates it would take more than a thousand years to produce that many drives. Not to mention that the price of buying those hard drives would cost up to 80 trillion dollars — greater than the GDP of all countries on Earth.

Let’s just establish one thing NSA: without major improvements in storage technology, yottabyte storage capabilities is simply absurd. Just get yottabytes out of your mind and stop telling people you need yottabytes, it makes you sound dumb. Even the zettabyte, which is 1/1000 of a yottabyte, is silly but let’s use that as an example anyway.

Here’s some rough math: one zettabyte is a billion 1tb hard drives. Of course, the NSA being high tech wouldn’t buy 1tb hard drives, they’d go for the higher capacity 4tb drives. Let’s assume that if you buy 250 million cheap consumer-grade hard drives you get a discount, so they get them at $150 each which would come to a $37.5 billion dollars for the bare hard drives alone (well, and a billion tiny screws).

That just might fall in their budget, but I’d recommend they not try to turn them all on at once, 250 million hard drives would require 6.25 gigawatts of power (great Scott!). Of course, drives need servers and servers need switches and routers; they’re going to need a dedicated nuclear power plant. They’re going to need some fans too, 4.25 billion btu definitely would be uncomfortable.

Surely they wouldn’t need all the data to be online at once, so they might consider tape drives. The IBM 3592 can store 4tb on each tape and large libraries of tapes can be managed with robotic retrieval systems. The only problem is the data transfer rate: 250mb/s. At that rate, it would take a 100,000 tape drives running 24/7 more than 350 years to save a yottabyte of data. Besides, finding stuff on 250 million tapes would be such a pain.

Another option that would use much less electricity and far less space would be 128 GB microSDXC cards. Except that you would need 9,444,732,965,739,290 of them. At $150 each.

I guess it’s back to hard drives. The trick is getting 250 million drives, which is about a third of all drives manufactured in a year. If they manage to get their hands on all those drives and find someone to haul them to Utah, they still have to install them. It takes me about 5 minutes to install a drive, which means it would take 10,000 people almost a year to install millions of hard drives into about 600,000 server racks. And housing 600,000 rack will require building at least twenty more of those billion dollar Utah data centers. The NSA will need their own dedicated county.

Therefore, with a dedicated county and a nuclear power plant and a billion screws (a number of which will get lost in some carpet) and maybe a hundred years, yeah the NSA could have a zettabyte. Just repeat that 1000 times for their yottabyte. So you see NSA, I know you think you might need yottabytes of storage, but even a zettabyte is preposterous. I know that hundred billion dollar budgets make you feel like you can buy the world — and maybe you can buy the world — but you definitely are not buying a yottabyte of storage.