That depends on what you expect to do with it, and how much you have.
To take some extremes:
data you read and change very frequently might be cheapest stored on RAM disks (backed by SSDs) - CPU time is heat and electricity, and in a datacenter that can become very expensive.
a small amount of data you can afford to read very slowly if/when you need it could be cheaply stored in Amazon's Glacier service.
Data where redundancy and ease of management are unimportant can be happily stored on 2TB commodity hard drives which you can get readily for $40/TB.
If it's the right amount, time and place, there're freebie USB pendrives, at a cost of ~$0/MB if you have one lying around.
So, what's your use case? That will lead you to your storage.
I saw Amazon's Glacier service but I'm interested to know if there is anything cheaper. I don't need particularly fast reading or writing abilities, just the ability to do it when needed.
As long as the service can store my data with a less then 1% chance of loosing it in a given year and allows me to access it at the rate of a few gigabytes per month I'd be happy. I'd be storing anywhere from a few gigs to a few terabytes.
I don't think you're going to get cheaper than Glacier. You could probably colo an atom server with 2x 6TB drives fairly cheaply somewhere but then you'd have to amortize the $8000~ cost of the server over how long you plan to keep it running.
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[ 229 ms ] story [ 1443 ms ] threadTo take some extremes: data you read and change very frequently might be cheapest stored on RAM disks (backed by SSDs) - CPU time is heat and electricity, and in a datacenter that can become very expensive.
a small amount of data you can afford to read very slowly if/when you need it could be cheaply stored in Amazon's Glacier service.
Data where redundancy and ease of management are unimportant can be happily stored on 2TB commodity hard drives which you can get readily for $40/TB.
If it's the right amount, time and place, there're freebie USB pendrives, at a cost of ~$0/MB if you have one lying around.
So, what's your use case? That will lead you to your storage.
How important is the data?
What level of redundancy do you need?
How much data is there?
How frequently will you be writing new data into the storage set?