Without supporting calculations, I don't believe the numbers very much. Of course Quantum, as a manufacturer of tapes and tape drives, will have chosen assumpt

Without supporting calculations, I don't believe the numbers very much. Of course Quantum, as a manufacturer of tapes and tape drives, will have chosen assumptions that support using their product lines. At $0.022/GB, the cheapest 3GB spinning media disks [source: pcpartpicker.com right this second] will only set you back $22,000 for the 333 of them it takes you to get to 1PB. Now, that leaves out a LOT of the cost to operate them over 3 years, but the difference between $22,000 for 1PB of raw HDDs and $1,666,000 for the estimated 3-year TCO means I've missed over 98.6% of the total cost according to Quantum.