How Much Does a 1 Exabyte Hard Drive Cost?

As of the latest available data, purchasing a 1 exabyte hard drive is an impractical endeavor for the average consumer due to its extraordinarily high cost and the lack of commercially available individual hard drives of that capacity.

Understanding Exabyte and Current Market Norms

A single exabyte is equivalent to 1024 petabytes or 1,048,576 terabytes. For reference, common consumer hard drives on the market range from a few terabytes to several dozen terabytes. This comparison highlights the vast difference in scale when considering exabyte-level storage.

Enterprise Storage Solutions

In enterprise settings, data storage systems can aggregate multiple hard drives to achieve exabyte-scale storage. However, the cost of such solutions would depend on specific factors such as technology, redundancy, and performance requirements. Roughly, large-scale storage solutions could cost millions of dollars, though exact pricing would vary depending on the vendor and the specific setup.

Current Market Prices

A quick search on Amazon indicates that 1 terabyte (TB) hard drives start at around $45 for no-name brands, and high-end server drives can go up to a couple of hundred dollars. Solid State Drives (SSDs) start at around $80 for 1 TB and can become quite expensive as capacity increases.

The question of how much a 1 exabyte hard drive would cost can be broken down into the need for multiple terabyte drives, enclosures to house them, and additional hardware such as racks to mount the drives. Here’s a detailed breakdown:

1 Terabyte Drives

As of February 2020, Seagate was offering a 16 TB drive. To achieve 1 exabyte (which is 1,000,000 TB), we would need 62,500 of these drives. One such 16 TB drive costs around $395.98. Therefore, the cost for 62,500 drives would be approximately $24,687,500.

Enclosures and Racks

Each 16 TB drive would need to be placed in an enclosure. The cheapest enclosure holds 12 3.5-inch drives and costs around $2,500. For 62,500 drives, we would need approximately 5,209 enclosures, costing about $13,022,500. Additionally, for housing these enclosures, a 42U 4-post open rack would cost around $425 each. With 22 enclosures per rack, we would need 2,370 racks, costing approximately $1,007,250.

Total hardware cost: $24,687,500 (drives) $13,022,500 (enclosures) $1,007,250 (racks) $38,717,250

Additional Costs and Considerations

Power consumption and cooling are significant factors. Assuming each drive consumes 10 watts, the total power consumption for the drives alone would be around 6,300,000 watts. Additional infrastructure, networking, and maintenance costs would further increase the total expenditure. These costs are not included in the hardware cost alone.

Furthermore, the logistics of setting up and managing such a data center would be extremely complex, involving significant physical space, reconfigured electrical systems, and cooling solutions.

Conclusion

While it is technically possible to have 1 exabyte of storage, the practicality and cost make it a non-viable solution for most consumers and small to medium enterprises. Unless you are handling extremely large-scale data requirements, you are unlikely to need anything close to 1 exabyte of drive capacity.