Dealing with gobs of data

It is often said that even at lower levels of autonomy, connected cars generate something like 25 Gbytes of data every hour. Fully autonomous vehicles are expected to puke out perhaps 19 Tbytes hourly. That’s a lot of data to deal with. Your average 32-GB smart phone would fill up at that rate in about seven seconds. The device visible in the hands of Quantum Corp.’s Anthony Tocco is designed to help AV developers manage this data onslaught. It is basically a big solid-state drive that can hold up to 64 Tbytes and is designed to plug into computers monitoring AV functions during development efforts. When it fills up, developers yank it out and plug in a new one. Meanwhile, the full drive plugs into an active storage facility characterized by a high-performance parallel file system that handles access by analytics programs. Eventually, the data gets sent to lower-cost storage facilities such as a tape back-up or to the cloud, depending on the situation. The whole scheme is said to be much less expensive than traditional storage methods.

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