**If you never hear from me again, you know I went to far with this missive.**

But if you had to store all the phone calls in America. 

With Content: I can't see it as BLOBS.  Although, its only mono 8kbs 11-22khz. with the right compression one could get it down to about 3 mb's / hour of one conversation.

If its brute force, I'll include fax machines, pagers and such placing number of phone numbes in the US to be around 1 Billion.

Say ten percent usage at any time. 100 Million 24/7.

3x24 72 mb's per call x 100 million 7.2 billion MB's per day.

Which comes in around 72 Terabytes of data. Daily.

If I took one of these:

The biggest I found with a cursory look.  I upped the drive sizes to terabyte each but then

There is one problem. I'm still only at 32 Terabytes a piece.

Next problem. 6 terabytes an hour. 100 gigabytes a minute. 1.6 gigabytes per second.

Well over the bandwidth of the all the call data.

One might say well have multiple recordings in different sites.  The duplication out of state occurs.  Still a possiblity but it would no longer be 'national'.

I'm thinking its not that the NSA wouldn't record all the calls but I think they just can't do it carte blanche.

Now its a different story were some speech to text be involved.

Any other thoughts?

This article was a great piece of information!  Great work!  I think that we all appreciate the time and effort that you put into this research.  I will keep this all in mind for future reference.

Thanks,

~D

Artical was very Useful.

I tried the below query

create table MyTest 
 (       mychar1 char( 8000) 
         , mychar2 char( 39), 
         , myvarchar3 Varchar( 8000), 
         , myvarchar4 Varchar( 8000), 
         , myvarchar5 Varchar( 8000) 
  
Then I inserted data.

Insert into MyTest values('r1','r1','12345678901',null,null)  - Not Working(row size =8061)

Insert into MyTest values('r1','r1','1234567890',null,null) -Working

Insert into MyTest values('r1','r1','123456789','1',null) -Not Working(row size =8062)

Insert into MyTest values('r1','r1','1234567','1',null)- Working

Insert into MyTest values('r1','r1','123456','1','1') -Not Working(row size =8062)

Insert into MyTest values('r1','r1','1234','1','1')-Working

In the above case, is the bytes allocated ( 10 + 2)  for backpointer is used for data at runtime ?

Please can you explain this situation!!