Then there’s their rocket, The Great Rocket of the People, the Kim Dung Dong Long Song Pong Ill, or “Long Dong”. I may not have all the names just right.

What a difference a little political philosophy makes: A little south of the People’s Perfect Paradise of our Great Patriotic Leader Little Dung is Samsung which just announced

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-unveils-2-5-inch-16tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/

a solid state disk (SSD) drive in the 2.5″ size with 16 trillion bytes (terabytes) of space. If I understand the details, they get this density by stacking the storage units vertically 48 units high.

“At the Flash Memory Summit, as reported by Golem.de, Samsung showed off a server with 48 of these new SSDs, with a total storage capacity of 768 terabytes and performance rated at 2,000,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).”

Two billion operations a second! That’s got to be some data rate!

I like it: Part of my server farm architecture is some fast storage, say, SSD drives, that write, say, once a week but read thousands of times a second. Writing an SSD causes it to wear out, but writing only once a week the thing should last decades.

My back of the envelope rough estimate was that 150 terabytes would be enough to serve the world. Okay, that’s just 10 of these Samsung puppies! More of that estimate was that I’d need a server farm with floor space area of just 20,000 square feet, but with progress like this Samsung SSD (and there’s more such) that area is falling fast!

Then for reading thousands of times a second, the 2 billion IPOPs look good! My back of the envelope arithmetic says that reading 45 times a second should yield $1 million a month in revenue.