Four Surprising Facts About Data Storage

For those outside the storage industry, it’s easy to dismiss the subject as dry and uninteresting. But as everyday functions continue to be digitized, everyday objects get “smarter” (that is, stuffed full of sensors), and the AI ecosystem continues to grow like wildfire throughout the business world, it’s becoming increasingly clear that ensuring quality and consistent data storage will be the muscle that keeps the modern world running. As data storage has evolved and new technologies have emerged, many fascinating facts about data storage have presented themselves. 

See also: Scaling Up: How Multi-Tech Data Platforms Enhance Data Management

Hard Drives Technically Weigh More When Full

Anyone can tell that a full file cabinet weighs more than a drive storing all the same files in digital versions. But that does raise the question if the digital storage of those files weighs anything at all. As Einstein famously theorized, e = mc². That formula shows that energy is defined by mass. Thus, we can infer that energy has a weight, even if it’s negligible.

Now, hard drives record data by magnetizing a thin film of ferromagnetic material and forcing the atoms in a magnetic field to align in a different direction. Since magnetic fields have differing amounts of energy depending on whether they’re aligned or anti-aligned, technically the weight does change. According to the calculations of David Zaslavsky, it’d be approximately 10^-14 g for a 1TB hard drive. Luckily, such an amount is essentially unmeasurable. There’s no need to worry about adjusting for weight in a data center when the drives are full.

The Cloud Can Get Really Loud

One thing that people don’t often realize is that the physical data centers can run at high volumes. This is thanks to a combination of factors, largely cooling systems. Backblaze previously measured its its own data centers at approximately 78db. Other data centers can reach up to 96dB roughly the equivalent volume of a nearby motorcycle, newspaper press, or power mower, with likely hearing damage after 8 hours of exposure.

It’s worth investing in ways to reduce the noise—if not for worker safety, then to reduce the environmental impact of data centers, including noise pollution. There are a wealth of studies out there connecting noise pollution to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, high stress levels, sleep disturbance, and good ol’ hearing loss in humans. In our animal friends, noise pollution can disrupt predator/prey detection and avoidance, echolocation, and interfere with reproduction and navigation. Luckily, there are technologies to keep data centers (relatively) quiet such as acoustic enclosure around loud items such as diesel generators.

Data Storage Doesn’t Last Forever, But That Could Soon Change

While files themselves don’t physically expire, the storage mediums saving them degrade over time.

Backblaze has extensive research available on how long drives last before failing, and the findings show it can take several years before that expiration happens. While every model of drive is unique, there’s some basic time frames involved: 4–7 years for hard disk drives (HDDs), 5–10 years for solid-state drives (SSDs), and flash drives have 10 years of average use.

However, with new technologies—and their consumer applications—emerging, we might see these timeframes get left in the dust. The Institute of Physics reports that data written to a glass memory crystal could remain intact for a million years, a product they’ve dubbed the “Superman crystal.” So, look out for lasers altering the optical properties of quartz at the nanoscale—we certainly will be checking them out if a customer ever asks to store their files for a million years.

Data Centers Benefit From Expensive Real Estate

Optimizing your connectivity (getting data from point A to point B) to the strongest networks is no simple feat. And, it’s important to remember that there’s a hardware element to those networks. So, where there are more people, there’s more networking infrastructure. From an operational standpoint, you’d likely assume it’s a bad choice to have your data center in the middle of the most expensive real estate and power infrastructures in the world. However, there are tangible benefits to joining up all those networks at a central hub and to putting them in or near population centers.

We call those spaces carrier hotels—facilities where metro fiber carriers meet long-haul carriers for dozens of network providers. As a result, those carrier hotels sit on some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Citing DGTL Infra, the biggest carrier hotels are located in the downtowns of Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, New York City, and Seattle. Did you know that 80% of the traffic on the internet passes through the Dallas Infomart? It’s no wonder they have over 70 carriers to connect with in that property!

Data Storage Is Only Going to Get More Interesting

Today it’s estimated that there are over 8,000 data centers (DCs) in the world, built on a variety of storage media, connected to various networks, consuming vast amounts of power, and taking up valuable real estate. As the need for storage grows and new technologies reach the market, I’m excited to see how the industry evolves and what quirks and counterintuitive concepts emerge next.