Doing some digging, I find it rather hard to find data on the amount of traffic being sent in and out, and internally of the US. The best numbers I could find was from almost 10 years ago, which said around 970Gbit/s. Say it has gone up 100x, and we get a nice round number of 10 TB disk space needed per second.
We know, thanks to XCD, that 7523 hard drives per second is created by the storage industry (globally, a total of 650 million drives per year). Say that the average storage space is over the last 5 years, around 500GB.
That mean, so long NSA buy's 0.265% of all hard drives produced each year, they will have enough hard drives to record all data transmitted inside the US borders.
They would still need to write the data. One obvious way would be to store it on site, and transport the drives to a central place. Drives are not big, but it is a noticeable work, so if people were doing this, there should be more verifiable proof of it. If we include post-storage compression, finding duplicates and any other tricks, the numbers should be able to be lowered by 50-75% or so, and might be enough to send some through the wire and only the overflow through drives loaded onto trucks.
One could also ask what 0.265% of the storage industry output is in raw cash. To answer that, my answer is, I dont know :).
There could also be an incoming relevance filter. I'm sure the NSA has no interest in archiving all the pornography, spam, and cat pictures ever transmitted.
Also note that the majority of bandwidth nowadays is spent on videos and similar multimedia content. So if they notice that 100M people are watching Bieber's latest music video, they just need to store the YouTube URL. No need to store 100M copies of the video itself.
We know, thanks to XCD, that 7523 hard drives per second is created by the storage industry (globally, a total of 650 million drives per year). Say that the average storage space is over the last 5 years, around 500GB.
That mean, so long NSA buy's 0.265% of all hard drives produced each year, they will have enough hard drives to record all data transmitted inside the US borders.
They would still need to write the data. One obvious way would be to store it on site, and transport the drives to a central place. Drives are not big, but it is a noticeable work, so if people were doing this, there should be more verifiable proof of it. If we include post-storage compression, finding duplicates and any other tricks, the numbers should be able to be lowered by 50-75% or so, and might be enough to send some through the wire and only the overflow through drives loaded onto trucks.
One could also ask what 0.265% of the storage industry output is in raw cash. To answer that, my answer is, I dont know :).