SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sony has built a prototype of a device that can hold onto a massive 1.5 petabytes of data for the long term — on good old Blu-ray discs.
The system, which stands more than 6 feet tall, contains 15,000 discs, distributed out onto 60 “platters,” with 10 stacks of 24 discs in each “platter.” It’s designed to consume just a teensy-weensy bit of power — 120 volts and 5 amperes.
The system takes 30 seconds to two minutes to retrieve information on a disk after retrieving the right one using a robotic arm near the top of the unit.
“You can see motion is not so fast — so very, very low,” a Sony employee said of the system’s power consumption at an exhibition booth at the Open Compute Summit today.
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The demo follows moves on the part of Sony and other companies showing that Blu-ray discs could be a great medium for long-term, “cold” storage. Last year, Sony and Panasonic came forth with a new standard for this purpose called Archival Disc.
And at last year’s Open Compute Summit, a company called HIT Archive Corp. was demonstrating a Blu-ray box that could hold just a single petabyte.
Facebook was working with that company to do production testing of a prototype of that Blu-ray system. Now Sony is talking with Facebook and other companies about trying its system, Yuichi “Lewis” Hasegawa, general manager of Sony’s strategic business planning and marketing group, told VentureBeat.
