The Ultimate All-In-One Storage Solution

karnifex writes "Filled up your LaCie Bigger Disk already, and looking for a little more storage space? Good news! The Petabox is ready! 'The petabox by the Internet Archive is a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes).' And luckily, as the Internet Archive notes, it's shipping-container friendly (20' x 8' x 8'). So save on delivery costs and order two!"

Business idea

[j_hirny]

Maybe someone should try to sell these boxes to GMail? They will surely need a lot of storage space.

To give you an idea of how much that truly is:

[Three Headed Man]

If you gave me a 100 mbit line, it would take me over 92 days to fill it up with porn. More if I slept.

Sooooo....

[Boogaroo]

Think someone like the government is going to keep track of who buys these things?

Re:colossal...

[ambienceman]

Yeah and maybe we could clone a few of them (a couple scary and sporty spices) for our own conveniences.....hehe.for singing of course

two words

[Loconut1389]

Good God.

or alternatively

What for?

At least as far as the next year or two is concerned. RIAA has all but outlawed music on the computer and even so, a petabyte of $1.25 songs would cost you more than bill gates makes in a year. If you have a petabyte of home movies, you must be making porno films.. If you have a petabyte of DVD's ripped, you have several life sentences coming, even if you own all the dvd's somehow (more bill gates salary multiples). And if you have text files, then holy grapes batman, youll never read all that in 10 lifetimes.

I can see uses in the comercial realm, buying multiple units in order to backup. But if this is in anyway marketed toward the consumer, only the biggest 'mine has to be bigger than yours' geek would buy something like that right now. I'll probably have one of those on my desk/floor about 5 to 7 years from now when its affordable/realisitic for me.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Real monkeys use ed. Anything else and its no monkey: it's a damned ape!

read the docs

[curator_thew]

If you look down in the message list, you see a reference to pdf + ppt docs. Here's another related project Planet Ten Modular Data Centers [planetten.biz].

Yes, it's a petabyte once you fill the shipping container. Honestly, I thought of this idea last year (using stock shipping containers), and now I'm fascinated that they've made it happen.

My only suggestion is that this is prototype: the eventual production systems (say, a couple of years time) should have custom shipping containers for:
* any of the side panels can open to access a rack and hot swap failing racks, so there is no need for a middle entry aisle
* the cooling system should be built into the structure, like existing refigerant containers
* not just data storage, but also computing facilities

Hard drive lifespans

[MikeBabcock]

I'd love to see an equivalent to all the benchmarking websites out there for telling me what hardware is reliable, and not just fast. I already know what the fastest drives, fastest video card, quietest fans, etc. are, but which ones last longest? Which drives *never* have failures that affect real data? Which cables are properly certified and insulated for high-volume transfer in a confined space rubbing up against other cables? Etc.

If you know of such a site, tell me.

Interesting link...

[Noryungi]

It's right there under the pictures :

http://capricorn-tech.com/ [capricorn-tech.com]

The site is rather empty right now, but it seems this is the company that will market this petabyte machine... er... box... er... whatever the name is.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe after they focus on getting this done, they'll try to get the 1TB units fixed and shipped. My company was on backorder from the time they announced the 1TB unit (January) to the beginning of May. At this rate, the thing will available Q4. They have currently shipped 4 units thru PCMall/Macmall to date an the ones they have shipped are broken, hence the delay.

Re:Finally - monkeys

[Splork]

monkeys eventually write both vi and emacs while working on shakespeare

Re:wrong

[Elwood P Dowd]

Everyone I know says giga with a hard G. The only exception I know of is Christopher Lloyd's character in Back To The Future.

Re:Finally

[cfl]

I just use this:

Monkey Shakespeare Simulator [tninet.se]

Maybe not as much fun, but without the faeces
I've noticed that Mozilla Firefox seems to give better results than IE

Re:Potential customers

[moosesocks]

I believe that back in the 50s, the president of IBM enthusastically proclaimed that there was potentially a worldwide market for four, possibly even five computers. And this was good news.

So don't laugh!

(I'm sure there are PLENTY of organizations which could use this type of storage. The IRS and NASA being among them)

Scientific Data

[Scott Ransom]

I'm heavily involved in a 5-6 year project to use the Arecibo telescope to search for new pulsars. The project uses a new 7-beam receiver system, each of which takes data from up to 1024 nearby frequency channels. The data is 16-bit sampled over 15000 times per second from each frequency channel. We need the time and frequency resolution to find exotic millisecond pulsars.

Over the couse of the survey we expect to take about 1 PB of data. We're still trying to figure out exactly how we will process and store it all.

For more info, you can poke around here [naic.edu].

Re:read the docs

[TTK Ciar]

> * the cooling system should be built into the structure, like
> existing refigerant containers

There's been discussion/research at the Archive regarding exactly this :-)

> * not just data storage, but also computing facilities

Each petabox node is a completely functional ITX PC, running Debian Linux, so it is already also a computing cluster. It's not a very good one, unfortunately, because in the interest of keeping the heat and power down a very low-power processor was used, an 800MHz Via C3, which is marginal as an integer-intensive processor.

Also, the storage nodes (which comprise 796 of the 800 nodes) only have 100bT ethernet, which would limit the petabox's ability to efficiently make use of what processing power it does have (in the data distribution phase).

Nonetheless, 796 800MHz processors is nothing to sneeze at. When the PetaBox is being a PetaBox, its processors are mostly idle. I'm sure folks will figure out something to do with those spare cycles (or perhaps not, considering that exercising the processors noticeably increases the power and cooling burden).

-- TTK

Re:Useless Statistics!

[aboyko]

How many Library of Congresses is this?

50

Oh, it isn't, either. Will you people knock it off already with the Library of Congress == 20TB comparison? It's some sort of inane computation made as if the collection were only books, and all the books were represented as ASCII text only. Well, guess what? It's not, and they're not.

American Memory [loc.gov] alone is a good bunch of terabytes, and that's just a wee digitized slice, just several million objects, of all the stuff in the Library. There's a lot. Of Stuff. A lot a lot a lot. Pictures. Maps. Movies. Big ol' stuff.

Well, I feel better. Thanks!

The Ultimate Storage Solution? I think not...

[ning]

10^15 bytes? Each human on Earth has 3 billion (3x10^9) base pairs of DNA. Assuming 2 bits to encode a base pair of DNA, that means a PetaBox(tm) can only store the DNA of 1.3 million people. So you'd need getting on for 5000 of these (assuming no compression) to store the entire population.