STORAGE

On 24 February 2004, the NCAR Mass Storage System (MSS) surpassed 1 petabyte of unique data. The MSS now holds 1,000,110,183 million bytes of unique data stored in 21,713,391 bitfiles. Including duplicates, the amount of data on the MSS exceeds 1.7 petabytes (1,719,557,529 million bytes). The MSS first stored a petabyte (one thousand trillion bytes) of data in November 2002, when the total of unique and duplicate files passed the petabyte milestone. While it took SCD nearly 16 years to reach the one-petabyte mark, it's expected to take less than two years to hit the second petabyte. SCD designed the MSS in the mid-1980s and has maintained it ever since. For more information on the storage capacity, growth, and development of the MSS, see "Super-sizing a community data trove" or the special issue of PowerCurve (printable, color PDF format) on the NCAR Mass Storage System.