Trillion 1000 bytes can't be stored on a single machine

#1

I’m working on scalability and was reading about tera sort and peta sort.
For Tera sort, sorting billion 1000 bytes is possible by storing them on a single machine.
However for Peta sort, sorting trillion 1000 bytes, is supposedly not possible by storing them on a single machine. I’m trying to understand why.
Is there an upper limit on the size of hard disk a machine can have?

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#2

There is always an upper limit on the size of hard disk a machine can have. It depends on your physical constraint, technology constraint, etc. However, with many different improvements, you will see this number changing (mostly increasing) nowadays.

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#3

Yeah I mean I understand why a 32 bit machine can’t have more than 4GB RAM, because addresses more than 4GB can’t be accessed by a 32 bit machine. So machine bitness <-> RAM constraint I understand. What are the factors affecting limit on hard disk size except physical and technology constraint? (assuming you are referring to manufactures not building bigger HDDs, but we always have an option to use multiple HDDs)

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#4

You might take a look of this http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/hard-disk-drives-capacity-limits/

It is impossible to have no limit on any reasonable system which has physical presence even though we haven’t approached to the theoretical limits yet.

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