Remember when Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Glacier, a data archiving service, almost 2 years ago? Long-term, slow-retrieval (3-5 hours) storage for 1¢/GB while maintaining several copies across geographies. Pretty amazing. Less amazing now that disk prices are reaching 3¢/GB, but there’s still power, cooling, mounting and replacement costs to consider in addition to multiple copies. Tape? Amazon denied that. Plus the long-term storage requirements for tape require a level of climate control that their data centers may not support. Not tape. Hard drives to the rescue?That left disk. Perhaps Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives that, in theory, could double existing drive density at the cost of expensive rewrites. Which an archive wouldn’t have. Seagate announced they’d sold a …

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Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL

Also published on Medium.