I can build a 720T raw SSD storage box for ~$138k Or a 648T raw HDD storage box for ~$53k To get that up to raw 10 PB, I need ~$2m for all-SSD, or ~$850k for

I can build a 720T raw SSD storage box for ~$138k Or a 648T raw HDD storage box for ~$53k To get that up to raw 10 PB, I need ~$2m for all-SSD, or ~$850k for all-HDD Bake-in a 2-system safety margin, and that's ~$2.3m all-SSD or ~$960 all-HDD Run TrueNAS and ZFS on each of them ... and my overhead becomes a little bit of cross-over sysadmin/storage admin time per year and power Say that's 1 FTE at $180k ($120k salary + 50% overhead) per year (even though actual admin time is only going to be maybe 10% of their workload - I like rounding-up for these types of approximations) Peak cost, therefore, is ~$2.5m the first year, and ~$200k per year afterwards And, of course, we'll want to plan for replacement systems to pop-in ... so factor-up to $250k per year in overhead (salary, benefits, taxes, power, budget for additional/replacement servers) Using [Wasabi](https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info), 10PB is going to run ~$62k/mo, or ~$744k per year It's cheaper to build-vs-buy in no more than 5 years ... probably under 3