This is probably close, at least for launch.
The problem with this theory, however, is that tape still would have been cheaper with roughly the same footprint, and tape has the benefit of often being forward-compatible too, as the drives improve, so does the storage capacity of the tape.
The author dismisses that amazon wasn't using tape, but I haven't seen much evidence to support that necessarily.
Maybe the reality is they probably use a bit of everything. A robotic disk library, a robotic tape library, maybe a robotic optical library. Maybe they're secretly ahead of the rest of current tape technology and are getting 20TB out of a single tape. They could be using custom hard drives, or even having a robotic platter library.
One thing for sure is that it's not active disk drives, and I don't believe they keep all the data on optical disks alone, given that optical disks degenerate much quicker than magnetic storage.
The problem with this theory, however, is that tape still would have been cheaper with roughly the same footprint, and tape has the benefit of often being forward-compatible too, as the drives improve, so does the storage capacity of the tape.
The author dismisses that amazon wasn't using tape, but I haven't seen much evidence to support that necessarily.
Maybe the reality is they probably use a bit of everything. A robotic disk library, a robotic tape library, maybe a robotic optical library. Maybe they're secretly ahead of the rest of current tape technology and are getting 20TB out of a single tape. They could be using custom hard drives, or even having a robotic platter library.
One thing for sure is that it's not active disk drives, and I don't believe they keep all the data on optical disks alone, given that optical disks degenerate much quicker than magnetic storage.