Curious why the archive isn't using Backblaze's open storage pod design.
Backblaze's design, by their own admission, is good if you have low IO usage. Internet Archive has a much different usage set, where the instantaneous IO needs are higher, and thus, the backblaze design would be way too high latency for them. Things like caching and ECC are much more useful when you have the hot spots that Internet Archive tends to have.
I get that. Time to first byte isn't critical with the internet archive, and they could use a robust caching later (varnish?) in from of their s3-similar storage system.
Cloudflare would argue that time to first byte isn't critical, period
The 14 fold increase in capacity in one generation is incredible. There is still quite a revolution going on in storage. Any bets on whether the next generation will still contain spinning media?
I don't believe spinning disk is long for this world. 6TB SSD drives are already out, the price just needs to be driven down. Much lower power consumption at idle is a side benefit.
When you say out, do you mean there is actually one for sale that I could buy today?
Looks like there will be one in two months, from a company called Fixstars; the price estimate given in the article (which it calls optimistic) is $1800-$2400.