
The Internet Archive Petabox Storage System - Mayeu
https://archive.org/web/petabox.php
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toomuchtodo
Curious why the archive isn't using Backblaze's open storage pod design.

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Sanddancer
Backblaze's design, by their own admission, is good if you have low IO usage.
Internet Archive has a much different usage set, where the instantaneous IO
needs are higher, and thus, the backblaze design would be way too high latency
for them. Things like caching and ECC are much more useful when you have the
hot spots that Internet Archive tends to have.

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toomuchtodo
I get that. Time to first byte isn't critical with the internet archive, and
they could use a robust caching later (varnish?) in from of their s3-similar
storage system.

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feld
Cloudflare would argue that time to first byte isn't critical, period

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/ttfb-time-to-first-byte-
consider...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/ttfb-time-to-first-byte-considered-
meaningles/)

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jacquesm
The 14 fold increase in capacity in one generation is incredible. There is
still quite a revolution going on in storage. Any bets on whether the next
generation will still contain spinning media?

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toomuchtodo
I don't believe spinning disk is long for this world. 6TB SSD drives are
already out, the price just needs to be driven down. Much lower power
consumption at idle is a side benefit.

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jl6
When you say out, do you mean there is actually one for sale that I could buy
today?

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waterhouse
Looks like there will be one in two months, from a company called Fixstars;
the price estimate given in the article (which it calls optimistic) is
$1800-$2400.

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/205362-massive-6tb-ssd-
hi...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/205362-massive-6tb-ssd-hitting-the-
market-this-july)

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0x006A
rather dated by now, would be interesting to see how it evolved lately.

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feld
Wait, they used reiserfs? They wanted to keep their data, right? _yow_

