A petabyte is a large drive, one million gigabytes big. If you can' t imagine how big that is think of it this way: Many of us own PCs and laptops with 100-gigabyte drives now. A petabyte drive would have the storage capacity of 10,000 of these drives.
If you type "petabyte drive" into Google, you will see my site has the number one link for this term because, three years ago, I predicted you would have a petabyte drive on your desktop. I strongly recommend reading this article as you will see the amazing power a petabyte drive has.
Now, it is 2006, we are four years away from my prediction, and currently drives are sitting at the half-terabyte mark (I personally have a terabyte array in my home computer). I'm not sure if we will make desktop petabyte drives in four years, but if we do, I can guarantee you that it won't cost $4 million to own one.
EMC has launched its first petabyte array, a version of the company's flagship Symmetrix DMX-3 system that includes nine room-filling cabinets of drives. The Symmetrix DMX-3 system is built around 500GB drives.
The petabyte version includes a whopping 2,400 of them and goes for about $4 million. Of course, if your needs are more modest, you can always opt for one of EMC's "entry level" systems: A two-cabinet version that will give you a mere 480TB of storage is available for just $250,000.
ZDNet UK January 26, 2006