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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

It's 200TB. Not "more than a petabit". Please don't switch the units around just to make it sound bigger, it's disrespectful.

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I think it's so nice that storage, RAM, and Internet providers still use bits for the last 3 PDP owners out there who aren't on octets yet

(12 bit) Word.

There are legitimate reasons for storage to be specified in bits. Having to put everything in bytes is something you have to do for computer memory because it's only byte addressable. This is actually inconvenient and inefficient for a lot of real data. DNA and protein sequences come to mind. But storage isn't just about computers.

Internet and PC memory manufacturers have no excuse, though. It's just bigger numbers despite not being able to work with individual bits.

We need EBCDIC now. We all think in decimal. /s

I'm confused. I always see storage and RAM specified differently (bytes) than Internet speed (bits).

Actual memory chips are often measured in bits. Even though the devices are always measured in bytes.

It's a petabit in raw data, the way they're writing it. After error correction, framing and whatever else is done to the data, the capacity that users care about will be a fair bit smaller.

It is more than a petabit, though. A petabit is a hundred and twenty five terabytes.

Parent comment was likely hinting more at the bytes to bits switcheroo. Yes, technically the figure is correct but it's about as honest as a conversation about finance and switching from US dollars to Zimbabwean dollars.

The story of the one hundred trillion dollar bill is tragic but its existence today is simply hilarious.

Nobody switched the units around. It says bits, not bytes. Bits is standard in information theory. Bytes only make sense in the context of computers.

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