>For many users, the cost of archival storage is often dominated by >non-hardware costs. Our internal departmental recharge rates for (tape) >backed-up storage are on the order of $5/month to $10/month per GIGABYTE >of storage. That's $60/GB/year to $120/GB/year. Very little of that >cost is hardware. Considering that a GB of disk now costs $1 to $2 for >commodity disks, I can afford to keep several copies of my data online >for quick access when I do want it, especially when it is mostly >archival and doesn't change that often (almost never). You seem to be mixing apples and oranges -- looking on the one hand at the total cost of storage service and on the other at the cost of a disk drive on a shelf. At $1 per gigabyte, the disk drive on a shelf costs $.005/GB/month, whereas when that drive is used to provide storage service, the service costs at least $5/month. Unless $4.995 is for the backup (that you don't need when the disk _is_ the backup), I don't see these numbers saying anything about the cost of disk vs tape. My guess is that no more than $2 of that $5 is for backup service. BTW, it costs IBM around $20/GB/month for internal storage service, and it's been pretty much unchanged for the last 10 years. -- Bryan Henderson IBM Almaden Research Center San Jose CA Filesystems - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
