New Feature, 8,388,608 Petabyte Disks?

Jun 18, 2010

You may have noticed in the most recent F-Response Release (All Versions) we added the following feature:

"F-Response (All Windows Versions) now supports accessing physical disks greater than 2TB, theoretical limit of 8+ Zettabytes."

8 Zettabytes? Personally I hope no one ever has to image anything remotely close to that size, however I thought it would be interesting to give you a bit of back story behind that limit, why F-Response in prior versions didn't allow access to >2TB disks, and what you may need to confirm when potentially looking at larger than 2TB disks.

Let's start with how amazingly large 8+ Zettabytes is. According to Wikipedia, a Zettabyte is enough to make your head spin:

"According to the annual survey of the global digital output by International Data Corporation, the current total amount of global data is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes sometime during 2010. This is equivalent to the amount of data that would be generated by everyone in the world posting messages on the microblogging site Twitter continuously for a century."

Now that is a lot of tweets.

Now for additional detail, let's look at the breakdown. Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terrabyte, Exabyte, Petabyte, Zettabyte, and Yottabyte. Yes, there's actually a byte size called Yottabyte, you can look up all about it here. May the force be with you should you ever need to think about Yottabytes.

So, how do we know F-Response can theoretically support 8+ Zettabytes? Well F-Response (Windows Versions Only) now supports SCSI READ_16, which provides a 64bit Logical Block Offset, theoretically allowing access to 8,388,608 Petabytes, an amazingly large number.

Now, even though F-Response Targets (Windows) provide access to devices this large you may still need to make sure your analyst OS is capable of supporting them as well. According to Microsoft, Windows XP 64 and Windows 2003 Server SP1 were the first Windows OS versions capable of handling READ_16, for more details you can check out this technet article.

Large Logical Unit Support and Windows 2003 SP1

So, if you are looking at >2TB disks make sure your analyst Windows machine is WinXP64 or better (F-Response is a Windows 7 Logo'd Application).

Hopefully this post sheds some light on remarkably large disks and the support we've added to 3.09.08.

Thanks! Enjoy your weekend.

Warmest Regards,

M Shannon, Founder

F-Response

June 18, 2010