Will I ever own a zettaflop? | Hacker News

ZFS was made 128-bit in 2004 as some customers already had petabyte-scale datasets.

Storage capacity was said to double every 9 to 12 months, and single datasets passed 2^64 bytes over a decade ago.

The 64-bit limit is 2^64 bytes, and it was expected to be reached in about a decade.

Storage systems were described as lasting for several decades, while metadata structures already cannot fit in the RAM of the largest machines built today.

A fully populated 128-bit storage pool would hold 2^137 bytes and need at least 136 billion kg of matter.