Talking about storage capacity

Check this out, it's crazy I tell ya, crazy. The CERN institute writes "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently being built at CERN near Geneva, is the largest scientific instrument on the planet. When it begins operations in 2007, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually...."

15 petabytes is a ridiculous amount of data, so I decided to do a little simple calculation. I will compare the CERN machinery to the standard harddisk on the market today, which is 160GB in size. 15 petabyes of data a year is roughly:

• 93.750 standard harddisks per year
• 257 standard harddisks per day
• 11 standard harddisk per hour

If we assume that the price of a standard harddisk is about 80 USD, you will be spending:

• 7.500.000 USD per year
• 20.560 USD per day
• 880 USD per hour

The conclusion of this could be that CERN has a big bunker for storing all the 160GB standard harddisks...