Ask HN: Cheap Bulk Storage?

2 years ago, BackBlaze released specs for their storage pod, which is basically huge tract of drives wired together.

It's not fast, but it's cheap, and it's great for bulk-archiving documents.

Now it's 2011- Is there a better way of solving this problem? S3 is crazy expensive for massive (100+TB) archiving, and I'd rather go one-step above building my own system using custom frames and components.

Are there any web-services which offer bulk storage at somewhat reasonable rates? Are there off-the-shelf cases which offer 50+ HDs for a non-insane price?

> any web-services

You may want to take a look at http://www.wuala.com, although I'm not sure it will fit at your scale.

Besides other features, they offer two not-so-common things:

1) you can trade your own space for remote storage

2) they have local encryption (at your end)

That looks cool.

Where did you get the pricing from, to generate your cost estimates (ie. the 10/30c/gig)?

If you throw the serial number into google, you get a few resellers-

http://www.google.com/search?q=SC847E16-RJBOD1&ie=utf-8&...

2K - Case + Backplanes 1K - CPU, MB, RAM 3.3K - 45 1TB drives at 75 ea --

6.6K - 45TB RAID0 If I want it to be even somewhat sane, I'd add every 4th drive as spare/parity, which drops to 33G

$6600 / 35TB gives $.19/GB

That's higher than the .12 from the 2 year old BackBlaze box, but not much.

If instead we go with the $179 3TB WD drives, we can get slightly better than the pod pricing.

($179 * 45) / (45 * 3TB * .75) in dollars per gigabyte = $.08/GB

I'm remember being fairly skeptical of the Backblaze storage pods. What happens when you have a power loss situation? What happens when a drive dies? Seems like it would be pretty tough to maintain and service those custom pods with the unnecessarily expensive non-redundant custom power supplies. I'm going to second the Supermicro case recommendation made by wmf.