
Russian Hacker Builds 70 Terabyte Home Computer - jeffmiller
http://www.pcworld.com/article/208655/russian_hacker_builds_70_terabyte_home_computer.html
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tghw
BackBlaze, an online backup company, posted a great blog article a while back
about building their custom 67TB servers for just under $8,000. They even
include all the how to, and a link to the custom case manufacturer if you
wanted to do it yourself: [http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-
a-budget-h...](http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-
to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/)

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codedivine
What is so interesting about buying up tonnes of hard disks and connecting
them?

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jrockway
There must be something hard about it. I work at a huge company and constantly
get emails about deleting files from my home directory, because there is only
100G of storage for everyone.

All I know is that I have a 1TB 3-way RAID-1 array at home, and it cost less
to build that than it costs to pay me to cleanup my inbox. Not My Problem, I
suppose...

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tsotha
Where I work we have a super fast SAN for our storage, with a giant cache,
fiber everything, and separate channels for backups. The cost works out to
something like $1k/GB. Beyond that we're perennially short on rack space, so
there's a cost to buying new storage. I used to believe it would be cheaper
for the company to add storage than to make me clean up my home directory, but
I worked out the numbers one day and it's simply not the case.

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Retric
If your paying 1k/GB your getting the short end of the stick.

To put this in perspective you could have a redundant array of in expensive
RAM + network storage for less than this. (Excluding energy costs).

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listic
Closer to the source: <http://basanovich.livejournal.com/163813.html>

With more photos and crude English explaination from the author. Reposted by a
friend, as the original author doesn't disclose himself.

This piece of news made a couple of hops before it got out to English-speaking
internets.

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ctdonath
Unusual, but not hard. 1 USB port, tree of 12 hubs, pile of 70 1TB drives.
He's looking for accessible capacity, not speed.

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bobf
Western Digital just released a 3TB drive (~$239) - that would only require 24
drives to net 72TB.

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junkbit
Yes the Seagate 3TB that was also just released has a lot of heat problems. If
you are looking for 3TB go for the WD

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Tichy
I'd like to wait for a year to see that the design does not go up in flames
before I applaud it.

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srean
Now if only I could build a CM-5 clone for my home.

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exit
how soon can we expect this capacity to fit in a usb stick?

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Retric
You could probably build one today, but if you mean for a reasonable cost,
then it's probably 15-20 years depending if storage doubles every 18 months or
2 years.

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exit
> _You could probably build one today_

you mean the technology to achieve such density already exists? that's
interesting.

do you expect storage to keep up with moore's law?

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Retric
You can already buy 512GB USB drives, because you don't need to power them
while not in use you can basically stack them indefinitely the only question
is would you conciser a 50 pound USB device a USB stick and would you pay
several hundred k to do so?

Storage has experienced rapid exponential growth for a while.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.svg)

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seltzered
Hope he's using a decent modern filesystem (e.g. zfs)

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known
In Russia, Home Computer builds Hacker.

