96TB in 5U: coming soon to a JackRabbit near you

Engadget is reporting (thanks Andrew!) that 2TB drives are about to ship from Western Digital. In the face of Seagate’s … er … firmware issues I think we are going to see Western Digital drives in JackRabbit’s soon as a standard option.

Not sure if these are enterprise drives going on sale (not likely, betting they are consumer drives), but we have customers that want these. 48 of these in 5U. 96TB raw in 5U. 19.2TB per rack unit density. 8 of these units per rack. 768TB RAW per rack. Usable space in RAID6 with 1 hot spare per RAID card would be 84TB. 672 TB usable RAID6 space per rack. At 1+ GB/s per unit. 8+ GB/s per rack. Would take 1 day (84000s) to read through all these drives (each unit doing reads in parallel).