> 750,000 GB = 750 TB, and you can buy an 8 TB hard drive for $150. So for $15,000 you can store 500,000 human genomes. As others have mentioned [1], the raw s

> 750,000 GB = 750 TB, and you can buy an 8 TB hard drive for $150. So for $15,000 you can store 500,000 human genomes. As others have mentioned [1], the raw sequencing data (still) has to be stored, so 1.5GB is off by about 30x. Even at 6:1 compression, that's still 5x. More importantly, though, the cost of storage, especially at scale, is significantly higher than just the price of bare drives. Backblaze famously complained about this [2] in 2009. Even their particularly cheap, particularly low-performance solution claimed to add almost 45% on top of the cost of the bare drives. A higher-performancd storage system (using, say, standard SAS expander backplanes instead of their non-standard SATA multipliers) has, in my experience, added 70% on top of the bare drives (and that's being frugal, which seems remarkably rare, even among startups). Your $15k is now $128k, minimum. That's just purchase cost, and, while operating cost isn't huge for that little storage, it's not zero. The cost gets much, much worse, if the orgnization can't/won't hire someone like me or won't allow that someone to implement such a frugal DIY assembly (which is the vast majority of organizations today). That leaves "enterprise" storage or cloud, which are both approximately as expensive. I recently heard an estimate of half a million dollars per petabyte for NetApp, which would translate to $1,875,000 here. [1] Well detailed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17821523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17821523 [2] famous on HN, anyway. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-...