Stalking the wily petabyte

I can remember when an 80 megabyte hard drive was an extravagant, four-figure upgrade to a computer. I remember being blown away in 1998 when I learned that Microsoft’s TerraServer project contained one terabyte of data.

Today, I’ve got three terabytes (that’s ~3,000 gigabytes) of storage scattered among a handful of internal and external drives, and that’s starting to feel a bit cramped. So, where do you go when terabytes are insufficient?

If you’re BackBlaze, a company that provides “unlimited” online backup space for $5 per month, the next step is measured in petabytes (~1,000 terabytes or 4 quadrillion bytes, numbers that make even the US Congress look like an underachiever). BackBlaze has built and, presumably, continues to build its storage system in components that they refer to as “pods,” each of which contains 45 1.5 terabyte Seagate hard drives, totaling 67 terabytes. Total cost of each pod: just $7,867. And if you want to build one for yourself, BackBlaze has helpfully provided detailed instructions. It really is a DIY project, albeit a bit more technically challenging than painting the guest bedroom.

BackBlaze has managed to get the cost of a petabyte of storage down to $117,000, or around 150% of the cost of the raw hard drives. This is a pretty amazing feat, especially considering that some of the currently available turnkey storage solutions run north of $2 million.

H/T: TechBlips via Twitter