Researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz have developed the idea of Pergamum, a new disk-based approach for archiving data.

Pergamum uses both intra-disk and inter-disk redundancy to guard against data loss, relying on hash tree-like structures of algebraic signatures to efficiently verify the correctness of stored data.

They believe a 10 petabytes storage system could be built for about $4700, with an annual operational cost (power for running and cooling the system) of about $50.