Ask HN: Inexpensive large scale (100's of TB) storage options?

Tape is the cheapest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape_data_storage

Prices don't show here, but in general it's 15 times cheaper and 200 times less energy to use tape.

Roll your own JBOD setup?

Thanks for the replies -

Need disk storage, would like to use 7200rpm for real-time access to logs, 15k for database/email apps

Would be a lot of fun to roll our own, but we are resource constrained, and while money is not an issue for us, I don't like complicated/expensive solutions, I like simple/inexpensive

Looking at NetApp for example, but having a hard time accepting the price point.

obligatory have you read about the backblaze pod design? comment:

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-h...

@latch - Yes, we saw it - would be a fun project, but we are software hackers :-) There are also concerns about heat, vibration, hot swapping, etc. I would happily spend $78K for that same storage instead of $7.8K if it was reliable and was shipped as a complete package.

Closest company doing something like this is CORAID, which might be an option, but they have a number of proprietary interfaces/systems to buy in to.