john.arnott (10/16/2009)
Yes, hard drives now cost in the range of a dollar a GB, but the line of business I support has to pay the enterprise infrastructure division quite a bit more than than on an ongoing basis as a pro-rated share of support services. I only wish I could say "go down to the nearest Best-Buy and pick up a couple of 2TB USB drives". Nope. In this (and I suppose most large corporations), managed storage is priced to the user based on the full estimated cost of ownership.
The hard drive storage is quite expensive when you're looking at Enterprise systems. We use SANS drives with fiber channel drives with redundant drives. Also, they are backed up on tape and sent off-site. The cost of these systems are extremely expensive. When we ask for space, they generally give us 50 Gigs max. If we want more, it requires an act of congress. Every byte makes a difference.
The log files that are generated by MSSQL is more annoying than the space used by the database itself. Those need to be backed up and then a shrink performed to recover that space. This needs to be done several times throughout the day since we have massive data loads and that increases the log files significantly.