16 million terablocks, or 8 billion terabytes.

Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available.

Some random search results say the global hard drive market is around an eighth of a billion units, but of course much of that will be smaller sizes.

So that should be physically realizable today (well, with today's commercial technology), with only a few years of global production.

You want someone to put "3.4*10^27 / 2^64" into a calculator? 200 million joules, using all the same assumptions. 50kWh. Though that leaves the question of how the energy requirements change when we're not going for extreme density (half a nanogram??).

If we instead consider a million 18TB hard drives, and estimate they each need 8 watts for 20 hours to fill up, 2^64 bytes take 160MWh to write on modern hardware. And they'll weigh 700 tons.

Edit: The quote is inconsistent about whether it wants to talk about bytes or blocks, so add or subtract a factor of about a thousand depending on what you want.

Storage densities can be extremely high. Filling 2^64 of storage is very doable and people have been doing it for a while. It all moves downstream; I remember when a 2^32 was an unimaginable amount of storage.

Many petabytes fit in a single rack and many data sources generate several petabytes per day. I'm aware of sources that in aggregate store exabytes per day. Most of which gets promptly deleted because platforms that can efficiently analyze data at that scale are severely lacking.

I've never heard of anyone actually storing zettabytes but it isn't beyond the realm of possibility in the not too distant future.