this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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50T isn't even that much data anymore. You're talking about maybe $2k in hard drives.
Refurbished Exos X22 drives with 24GB Capacity cost around 650€ these days, those 2k are the high end even nowadays.
If you're a multi-billion dollar broadcast parent company doing long term storage for a 70-year archive catalog, you can spring for new. Maybe even go Big Fancy and get some RAID drives and tape backups, for extra redundancy.
In the pre-AI days maybe, today 50TB is expensive due to increasing prices of all computer gear.
I don't believe you can go back more than five years and find per-TB rates under the current rate. Ten years is straight out. Twenty years is laughable.
Meanwhile, PBS has an annual operating budget of around $340M. They can afford to manage their own data, at the scale of tens of terrabytes. And I guarantee you that whatever they're paying Iron Mountain to host the data is multiples the cost of self-hosting.