Costs Associated with the Storage of Terabytes?

NetworkAttached asks: "I know of a company that has large online storage requirements - on the order of 50TB - for a new data-warehousing oriented application they are developing. I was astonished to hear that the pricing for this storage (disk, frames, management software, etc...) was nearly $20 million dollars. I've tried to research the actual costs myself, but that information seems all but impossible to find online. For those of you out there with real world experience in this area, is $20 million really accurate? What are the set of viable alternatives out there for storage requirements of this size?"

If you take

[Apreche]

the new 320 gigabyte harddrives previously mentioned. And you divide 50000 (50TB) gigs by 320. you get an approximate cost of having 50TB by multiplying that by 350$ the appoximate cost of the drive. However, with that much data a RAID is certaintly in order. So multiply the number of drives by 1.5 or 1.75 to get the number of drives needed for a RAID. Then multiply that by 350. This comes out to a little over 80000 dollars. The only cost left is the cost of all the raid controllers (expensive) and networking all the drives together. So for the raw storage of 50 terabytes it costs about $80,000. If you were to buy ultrafast scsi drives instead of the 320GB drives the price will be multiplied by about 3 since a 100MB super fast scsi drive is also about 300$ with 1/3 of the space. So that brings it to $240,000. Add to that the cost of labor and all the other hardware and I don't see how it could come out to more than 1 million dollars. I'm not an expert, but just doing the math it seems that more than that is too much.

Hmmmm...

[jo42]

Imagine how long FORMAT C: would take...

I know how.

[one9nine]

Floppies. Lots and lots of floppies. They are so cheap right now! And the come in pretty colors too.

CDs - Obvous choice

[getagrip]

Ok, Lets see. 50 Terabytes divided by 600 megs per CD means you will need 83334 CDs (rounded up.) At about 20 cents each (retail) that should only set you back about $17k. Add in $100 for some of those heavy duty shelving units from Home Depot and a wintel box to read and write them, and you are looking at well under 20k for total hardware cost. At this point, just go hire someone away from their McJob for a reasonable amount to swap the CDs and you are in business.

Re:Depends

[wfrp01]

If you're using Depends, you should always opt for the high speed reliable storage over the low speed crap storage.