{"id":117,"date":"2009-09-02T06:45:14","date_gmt":"2009-09-02T11:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2009\/09\/02\/090902_petabytes\/"},"modified":"2009-09-02T06:45:14","modified_gmt":"2009-09-02T11:45:14","slug":"090902_petabytes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2009\/09\/02\/090902_petabytes\/","title":{"rendered":"Stalking the wily petabyte"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/terraserver-usa.com\/about.aspx?n=AboutTech\">TerraServer project<\/a> contained one <i>terabyte<\/i> of data.<\/p>\n<p>Today, I&#8217;ve got three terabytes (that&#8217;s ~3,000 gigabytes) of storage scattered among a handful of internal and external drives, and that&#8217;s starting to feel a bit cramped. So, where do you go when terabytes are insufficient?<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re <a href=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/\">BackBlaze<\/a>, a company that provides &#8220;unlimited&#8221; online backup space for $5 per month, the next step is measured in petabytes (~1,000 terabytes or 4 <i>quadrillion<\/i> 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 &#8220;pods,&#8221; 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.backblaze.com\/2009\/09\/01\/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage\/\">detailed instructions<\/a>. It really is a <acronym title=\"Do It Yourself\">DIY<\/acronym> project, albeit a bit more technically challenging than painting the guest bedroom.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><i>H\/T: <a href=\"http:\/\/techblips.dailyradar.com\/story\/petabytes_on_a_budget_how_to_build_cheap_cloud_storage\/?utm_campaign=twitter-site-feed&amp;utm_medium=twitter-share&amp;utm_source=techblips\">TechBlips<\/a> via Twitter <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s TerraServer project contained one terabyte of data. Today, I&#8217;ve got three terabytes (that&#8217;s ~3,000 gigabytes) of storage scattered among a handful of internal and external drives,&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2009\/09\/02\/090902_petabytes\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Stalking the wily petabyte<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-technology","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}