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Data Storage

Below we highlight some data storage option at Yale that are appropriate for research data. For a more complete list of data storage options, see the Storage Finder. If you have questions about selecting an appropriate home for your data, contact us for assistance.

HPC Cluster Storage

  • Capacity: Varies. Cost: Varies
  • Sensitive data is only allowed on the Milgram cluster
  • Only available on YCRC HPC clusters

Along with access to the compute clusters we provide each research group with cluster storage space for research data. The storage is separated into three quotas: Home, Project, and 60-day Scratch. Each of these quotas limit both the amount in bytes and number of files you can store. Details can be found on our Cluster Storage page.

Additional project-style storage allocations can be purchased. See here for more information.

Google Drive via EliApps

Warning

Changes to Google Drive pricing

ITS has informed us of a number of changes to the EliApps Google Drive quotas, including shared drives.

  • As of 8/15/23, all new EliApps accounts will have a free quota of 5GB.
  • As of 7/1/24, all existing EliApps accounts will have a free quota of 5GB.
  • Quotas beyond 5GB will be available for $145/TB/yr

Therefore, you should probably not consider Google Drive on EliApps for storage large amounts of data. ITS suggested alternatives are Storage@Yale, Teams/SharePoint, or DropBox.

Google Drive is a cloud service for file storage, document editing and sharing. All members of the Yale community with an EliApps (Google Workspace for Education) account have storage at no cost in the associated Google Drive account. Moreover, EliApps users can request Shared Drives, which are shared spaces where all files are group-owned. For more information on Google Drive through EliApps, see our Google Drive documentation.

Storage @ Yale

  • Capacity: As requested. Cost: See below
  • No sensitive data (e.g. ePHI, HIPAA) for cluster mounts
  • Can be mounted on the cluster or computers on campus (but not both)

Storage @ Yale (S@Y) is a central storage service provided by ITS. S@Y shares can either be accessible on campus computers or the clusters, but not both.

Type Use
Object Tier Good for staging data between cloud and clusters
Active Tier Daily use, still copy to cluster before using in jobs
Archive Tier Long term storage, low access. Make sure to properly archive
Backup Tier Low-access remote object backup. Make sure to properly archive

For pricing information, see the ITS Data Rates. All prices are charged monthly for storage used at that time.

To request a share, press the “Request this Service” button in the right sidebar on the Storage@Yale website. If you would like to request a share that is mounted on the clusters, specify in your request that the share be mounted from the HPC clusters. If you elect to use archive tier storage, be cognizant of its performance characteristics.

Cluster I/O Performance

Since cluster-mounted S@Y shares do not provide sufficient performance for use in jobs, they are not mounted on our compute or login nodes. To access S@Y on the clusters, connect to one of the transfer nodes to stage the data to Project or Scratch60 before running jobs.

Microsoft Teams/SharePoint

  • Capacity: 25 TB, 250 GB per file. Cost: Free

You can request a Team and 25TiB of underlying SharePoint storage space from ITS Email And Collaboration Services. For more information on The relationship between Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive, see the official Microsoft post on the subject.

Dropbox at Yale

ITS offers departmental subscriptions to DropBox for a low cost (currently $23.66/user/year).

  • Unlimited storage (take this with a grain of salt)
  • Low risk data only

For more information about DropBox at Yale, see the ITS website.

Box at Yale

  • Capacity: 50GiB per user. Cost: Free. 15 GiB max file size.
  • Sensitive data (e.g. ePHI, HIPAA) only in Secure Box
  • Can be mounted on your local machine and transferred with rclone

All members of the Yale community have access to a share at Box at Yale. Box is another cloud-based file sharing and storage service. You can upload and access your data using the web portal and sync data with your local machines via Box Sync.

To access, navigate to yale.box.com and login with your yale.edu account.

For sync with your local machine, install Box Sync and authenticate with your yale.edu account.

For more information about Box at Yale, see the ITS website.

To learn more about these options, see the Yale Collaboration Counts page available through Yale ITS for details.

Last update: November 29, 2023