According to OpenAI 01, over 25,000 movies have been released on Blu-ray since the format went mainstream about 20 years ago*.
I wanted to know what would be the best way to store all of them in a small and manageable space. For this exercise, I assume that the average size of a Blu-ray movie is 40GB, which means that I would need 1PB of storage.
25,000 disks weigh just over 900 pounds (about 411Kg), not something you’d want to lug around. At the other end of the spectrum, 1PB of content can fit on 500 2TB microSD cards, which would cost around $85.000 and weigh just over 1.2Kg, swap for 1TB microSD cards would shave the total cost to about $45,000 and bump the weight to 2.5Kg. But you’d still need to organize 1,000 cards the size of a pinkie fingernail.
Spot prices for media
MicroSD
- Teamgroup 2TB: $189.99 at Amazon
- Sandisk Ultra 1.5TB: $107.46 at Amazon
- Teamgroup Go 1TB: $59.99 at Amazon
- Teamgroup Go 512GB: $28.99 at Amazon
Hard drives
- Seagate Expansion 24TB: $335.43 at Provantage
- Seagate Expansion 26TB: $372.91 at Provantage
- Seagate Expansion 28TB: $407.54 at Provantage
SSD
- Patriot P210 2x2TB SSD: $159.99 at Amazon
- Silicon Power A58 2TB SSD: $79.99 at Amazon
- Silicon Power A55 4TB SSD: $175.99 at Amazon
Tape
- Fujifilm LTO-8: $57.84 at TapeandMedia
- HPE LTO-8: $57.78 at TapeandMedia
- HPE LTO-9: $86.68 at TapeandMedia
How about perennial hard drives? You can buy a 24TB external HDD for about $335 (just under $14,000 in all). You’d need 42 of these, weighing about 48Kg and a total volume, without power supply, of just over 39 litres. As for SSDs, you can get cheap SATA SSDs (which look like cartridges anyway), for as cheap as $40 per TB or $40,000 for that project, for a total weight of about 100Kg. Yeah, just not there yet.
That brings us nicely to our last candidate. DNA, Ceramic, Silica, Glass, holograms, the good old tape. LTO-8 more precisely. You’d need 84 of them to shatter the 1PB barrier (each tape cartridge is 12TB in capacity), with a total price of $4,754. At 200g a pop, that’s about 17Kg in weight, not back-breaking and its size (21.5 x 105.4 x 102mm) means that you should be able to pack the media in a small suitcase.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Blu-ray movie disc | MicroSD | Hard Drive | SSD | Tape |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Size (TB) | 0.04 | 0.51 | 24 | 2 | 12 |
Volume (liter) | 0.1728 | 0.00017 | 0.9362 | 0.04872 | 0.22491 |
Weight (Kg) | 0.016 | 0.0025 | 1.176 | 0.046 | 0.2 |
Cost (USD) | $0.00 | $28.99 | $335.43 | $80.00 | $56.60 |
Write Performance (MBps) | 0 | 50.00 | 280 | 430 | 360 |
Quantity for 1PB | 25000 | 1953 | 42 | 500 | 83 |
Total Volume for 1PB | 4320 | 0.32 | 39.01 | 24.36 | 18.7425 |
Total Weight for 1PB | 400 | 4.88 | 49 | 23 | 16.67 |
Total Price for 1PB | $0.00 | $56,621.09 | $13,976.25 | $40,000.00 | $4,716.67 |
TB per liter (storage density) | 0.231 | 3103.030 | 25.635 | 41.051 | 53.355 |
Days taken to transfer 1PB | 0 | 231 | 41 | 27 | 32 |
Cost of reader/writer | 0 | 0 | 0 | $10.00 | $4,104.99 |
Warranty (years) | 0 | 100 | 1 | 5 | 100 |
Total cost | 0 | $56,621.09 | $13,976.25 | $40,010.00 | $8,821.66 |
Notes | Measured as a square Size of movies is an average | Row 14 - Cell 2 | Row 14 - Cell 3 | Standard external SATA SSD connector | Row 14 - Cell 5 |
Tape comes on top, again
Now these tapes will need a reader, and I believe the best way to get a reader is to buy an internal tape drive like this Magstor and add an external SAS-to-Thunderbolt enclosure such as this Areca Arc 4108-T3. At just over $4,100 for the pair, this bundle doesn’t come cheap but is compact enough to be carried around.
In my view, LTO-8 is a better choice than LTO-9 because of the price of the drive. LTO-9 has the upper hand when it comes to capacity (18TB), transfer rate (400MBps vs 360MBps) and has a slight advantage on price/TB.
Data tape remains the preferred archival storage media for many due to the maturity of the format. Fujifilm, for example, backs its tape with a lifetime warranty and claims it will last at least 30 years. Assuming an uninterrupted transfer process, it would take a staggering 32 days to move 1PB of data.
So there you have it, for less than $10,000, you could potentially store almost every single Blu-ray movie ever produced in a suitcase. What’s incredible is that by the end of this decade, a single SSD may offer a 1PB capacity, but at what cost.
* OpenAI 01 used Blu-ray.com, High-def Digest and various retail databases to come to that number. It made a few assumptions as well (e.g. not counting re-releases, multiple language editions, special editions etc).
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