This can still be the case nowadays in certain niche scenarios ... at U-M
CSG, we are building systems today with 1 PB of storage attached to a
single system; that is; quantity 360, 3 TB, 7200 RPM Enterprise SATA
spindles arranged in a RAID 60 configuration... I can't of course discuss
the specifics of the pricing but even when starting with a "loaded",
top-end, quad-socket, 4U system to host all the storage, the price of the
disk and JBOD enclosures is the greatest portion ... probably not to the
degree it may have been in the 1970s ... but off the top of my head,
storage probably shakes out to maybe 60% of the total bill on the cluster
gateway/fileserver machines that we build.
Best,
Sean
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 5:39 PM, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com>
wrote:
Wow, more than
hundred of these CDC drives??? This must have been a
massive
installation! I didn't know so many disk drives could be combined with
Cyber systems. Thanks for the insights!
Pretty much any of the big mainframes of the day - IBM, Univac, CDC,
Burroughs, and so forth - could deal with huge disk farms with
hundreds of disks. Often these farms were the largest expense of an
installation.
--
Will