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 <wdonze...@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 >
