IBM builds worlds largest ‘hard drive’.

IBM is building the 120 petabyte storage system at its California research lab. The previous largest system could store 15 petabytes. The system will be used to store up to one trillion files for powerful simulations of complex systems such as weather and climate models.

Standard home computers today often sell with up to 1 Terabyte of storage (1000GB). The new IBM storage system is equal to 120,000 of these computers. To put that into perspective, in 2009 the US Census Bureau estimated that 119,296 households in the US had a computer.