Political Crossfire Forums

[cool_chick]

I don't know if I'm allowed to post this here, ALL I WANT is the technology....that's IT.

Is it possible that the government could store multi-terabytes of data back in the mid to late 90s, to be destroyed (to me, this would mean that there was much, much more multi-terabytes stored since they would be storing everything, not just one topic)? What technology was used? Is it possible that they could have multi-terabytes of data? That's awfully large file sizes for that time.....

If so, what technology could they have possibly used?

No politics please, just technology discussion. Thank you.

[Seixon]

I don't know, how about Western Digital commercially available hard disks?

They had 10GB hard drives in 1996. 100 of those, and you have yourself a terabyte. By year 2000 they had 45GB hard drives. 22 of those, and you have yourself a terabyte.

You've got to be kidding, right? We're not talking about the mid-1980s here, we are talking about 1996-2000.

Please tell me this isn't just a big joke. Am I being punkd?

[cool_chick]

It would not be feasible to store that vast amount of kind of data on servers at that time Sexion.

Besides, I'm looking for someone in the IT industry at that time. But thank you anyway Sexion.

Actually, Ozzone offered a viable option, backup tape.

[Seixon]

Why wouldn't it be feasible? Arguing from authority doesn't help when you quite simply have demonstrated that you have no clue about what you are saying.

Someone who thinks that warehouses and warehouses were needed to store 2.5TB of data in 1998 are obviously not in tune with reality.

You'll really have to explain why backup tape is more feasible than hard drives at that time for use in servers.

In fact, I'm inclined to believe that most of the data centers used to support the infrastructure of the internet in 1998 were set up in the way I am describing, easily able to have 2.5TB in one data center. They were most definitely not using tape drives.

[Pzatchok]

Exactly what data type are you talking about?

Video is huge but text is very small and easy to store.

Most old government data that used to be on paper has been converted to PDF files since it was easy to bulk scan stacks of paper. Most new government data is now also stored as text in one format or other.

And a terabyte of data is really not that much considering that hundreds of hard disks can be in a storage system.

[cool_chick]

Pzatchok wrote: Exactly what data type are you talking about?

Video is huge but text is very small and easy to store.

Most old government data that used to be on paper has been converted to PDF files since it was easy to bulk scan stacks of paper. Most new government data is now also stored as text in one format or other.

And a terabyte of data is really not that much considering that hundreds of hard disks can be in a storage system.

Exactly...in 2006.

We're talking mid-late 90s.

[Pzatchok]

Our university had a terabyte in the mid 80's.

Stacked hard drives in a clean room. Albet they were as slow as hell and took days to totaly read and a person had to manually switch them out once in a while but we had it.

Starage was easy. Using it was hard.

[David]

The private sector is about 10 years behind the government as far as technology goes and since a few years ago you could do a RAID system that would stack 5 terra bytes The government probably could do lots more.

[Kt]

cool_chick wrote: Pzatchok wrote: Exactly what data type are you talking about?

Video is huge but text is very small and easy to store.

Most old government data that used to be on paper has been converted to PDF files since it was easy to bulk scan stacks of paper. Most new government data is now also stored as text in one format or other.

And a terabyte of data is really not that much considering that hundreds of hard disks can be in a storage system.

Exactly...in 2006.

We're talking mid-late 90s.
Umm, cool chick, seriously, it's called network storage, it was not the stone ages in the 1990's, the government could have easily bought enough hard drives and fileservers to get as many terrabytes as it wanted...

[cool_chick]

David wrote: The private sector is about 10 years behind the government as far as technology goes and since a few years ago you could do a RAID system that would stack 5 terra bytes The government probably could do lots more.

The government is ahead, but that's usually in the area of military development. The government is usually behind when it comes to things like records maintenance, etc. I know people who work for the government and they're always versions behind in their upgrades, etc.

Case in point is the national database. Look how long it took to get that going.....it still wasn't complete at election year....

The government doesn't pay terribly well either....our security officer (who joined perhaps 7 months ago), in his previous job, easily took a few people from FEMA based on salary alone.

I don't remember doing that kind of stacking in the mid to late 90s.

Does the CIA document management fit into the "military" advancement or into the records keeping management? That is also a question.

These are among the reasons why I doubted it at that time.....

[Seixon]

cool_chick, we're talking about 1999. Not 1989. :lol:

You already unmasked your complete ignorance by claiming it would have taken "warehouses and warehouses" to store 2.5TB.

Quit trying to mop up your dignity from the floor and save face by owning up to not having a clue.

[cool_chick]

Sexion, what the hell are you talking about?

Do you think 2.5 terabytes destroyed is everything....every single thing, the CIA had? Or just a fraction? If it's all the data they had on everything, Russia, other foreign intelligence, domestic intelligence, EVERYTHING, then yes, it wouldn't need warehouses to store. If it was a fraction (more realistic) then it would require warehouses and warehouses and warehouses to house all their data. Do you honestly think they had warehouses and warehouses and warehouses?

And with all due respect, were you even out of grade school in the above timeframe? If not, then why are you responding to this post? It clearly states those who worked in the industry during the timeframe.

[Kt]

cool_chick wrote: Sexion, what the hell are you talking about?

Do you think 2.5 terabytes destroyed is everything....every single thing, the CIA had? Or just a fraction? If it's all the data they had on everything, Russia, other foreign intelligence, EVERYTHING, then yes, it wouldn't need warehouses to store. If it was a fraction (more realistic) then it would require warehouses and warehouses and warehouses to house all their data. Do you honestly think they had warehouses and warehouses and warehouses?

And with all due respect, were you even out of grade school in the above timeframe? If not, then why are you responding to this post? It clearly states those who worked in the industry during the timeframe.
Not all of the government's data was held on computer in the 1990's, not all of it is held on computer today even, much more documents were in paper form then, so yes, to store all that physical data would require warehouses, but hundreds of computer hard drives is not so huge, and 2.5 terabytes is pretty small. Surely the government would have mirrors distributed across the nation, but they wouldn't NEED a whole warehouse, infact, the data would be far more secure in an underground bunker...

[cool_chick]

Helena` wrote: cool_chick wrote: Sexion, what the hell are you talking about?

Do you think 2.5 terabytes destroyed is everything....every single thing, the CIA had? Or just a fraction? If it's all the data they had on everything, Russia, other foreign intelligence, EVERYTHING, then yes, it wouldn't need warehouses to store. If it was a fraction (more realistic) then it would require warehouses and warehouses and warehouses to house all their data. Do you honestly think they had warehouses and warehouses and warehouses?

And with all due respect, were you even out of grade school in the above timeframe? If not, then why are you responding to this post? It clearly states those who worked in the industry during the timeframe.
Not all of the government's data was held on computer in the 1990's, not all of it is held on computer today even, much more documents were in paper form then, so yes, to store all that physical data would require warehouses, but hundreds of computer hard drives is not so huge, and 2.5 terabytes is pretty small. Surely the government would have mirrors distributed across the nation, but they wouldn't NEED a whole warehouse, infact, the data would be far more secure in an underground bunker...

But helena, I'm not talking by today's standards. Our exchange system in Chicago alone is 7 terabytes, but that's TODAY. Im talking mid to late 90sm, it was quite impressive then.

[Kt]

cool_chick wrote: Helena` wrote: cool_chick wrote: Sexion, what the hell are you talking about?

Do you think 2.5 terabytes destroyed is everything....every single thing, the CIA had? Or just a fraction? If it's all the data they had on everything, Russia, other foreign intelligence, EVERYTHING, then yes, it wouldn't need warehouses to store. If it was a fraction (more realistic) then it would require warehouses and warehouses and warehouses to house all their data. Do you honestly think they had warehouses and warehouses and warehouses?

And with all due respect, were you even out of grade school in the above timeframe? If not, then why are you responding to this post? It clearly states those who worked in the industry during the timeframe.
Not all of the government's data was held on computer in the 1990's, not all of it is held on computer today even, much more documents were in paper form then, so yes, to store all that physical data would require warehouses, but hundreds of computer hard drives is not so huge, and 2.5 terabytes is pretty small. Surely the government would have mirrors distributed across the nation, but they wouldn't NEED a whole warehouse, infact, the data would be far more secure in an underground bunker...

But helena, I'm not talking by today's standards. Our exchange system in Chicago alone is 7 terabytes, but that's TODAY. Im talking mid to late 90sm, it was quite impressive then.
Not for the government :-/

[David]

The government, or anybody for that matter, was using reel to reel tapes back in the 60's for storage.You can put a lot of information on a large reel of tape.The problem is retrieval speed.

[Pzatchok]

Our univercity in the 80's was using stacked hard disks.
Each one was about 18 inches in diameter and held almost 500 MB. you manually loaded and unloaded them inside a stacked drive holder. We had closets and closets of the disks and 4 stacks.
We could also connect by the "internet" to other universities to access their stacks and tapes.

As for thew government having terabytes of data in the 80's. Hell yea they could have that in satilite photos alone. Let alone cold war movies of soviet rocket launches and actual paper records on anything you could think of spy wise.

If you remember a bunch of years back 60 minutes did a report on the fact the the US government had several warehouses of paper data waiting to be transfered to digital data. The report was on just how much would get saved, what would get transfered and what would be destoyed. And what would it cost to do it all since it was costing several million just to store it in paper form.

[Rankor and Pissing]

Back in 1992 I helped install an optical disk storage system in a large fortune 100 company's facility. It stored 1TB on a single sided optical disk. The disk was about twice as large as an old LP record (maybe about 12-14 inches in diameter. they were bursting tons of data through a large OC48 natwork at the time and used it as a backup system. If I remember correctly, it cost about $280K for a single unit and was about as large as a washing machine. (Kinda looked like it as well). They had bought about 100 Disks which were in the thousands of dollars each at the time..

I'm sure if this company could afford it, the Government probably had a few hundred of them.

[cool_chick]

David wrote: The government, or anybody for that matter, was using reel to reel tapes back in the 60's for storage.You can put a lot of information on a large reel of tape.The problem is retrieval speed.

We had an system 36 at one time at my previous firm. Remember those? LOL. This reel-to-reel backup system held several Mb's at best.

Please, I promise you, I'm not trying to be confrontational, I'm finding this fun to relive those times, and really enjoying these experiences you guys are sharing.

[Pzatchok]

Next time just leave your questions in the conspiracy forum.