Storage Tiers

No sensitive data can be stored

CRCD storage in the Open Science Environment is not approved for HIPAA-protected health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII), or other data under protected controls. If you are working with protected data, the CRCD Secure Research Environment (SRE) may meet the requirements.

CRCD provides several storage tiers spanning the research data lifecycle — from fast flash for active computation to low-cost archive for cold data. Each tier trades performance for cost, so most groups keep data across more than one.

This page covers what each tier is for, how much you get at no cost, and how much additional storage costs. For the operational detail — full paths, permissions, snapshots, and checking your usage with crc-quota — see File Systems.

CRCD storage tiers: Active (flash), Warm (hard disk), and Archive (cloud)

Project storage tiers

Project storage is allocated per research group (Principal Investigator). PIs and their group members can create subfolders and stage data for compute jobs. The lifecycle framing in the graphic above maps onto the CRCD tiers as follows:

Tier Lifecycle File system Media Free allocation Additional capacity
Performance Active /vast All-flash 1 TB per PI $85 / TB / year
Standard Warm /ix, /ix1 Hard disk 5 TB per PI $30 / TB / year
Archive * Archive Cloud Cloud — $12 / TB / year

The performance tier (/vast) is all-flash storage delivering high-throughput, low-latency access over NFS. It is best for I/O-intensive and AI workloads that read and write to the filesystem heavily. Each PI receives 1 TB at no cost.

The standard tier (/ix, /ix1) is enterprise hard-disk storage for persistent, "warm" project data and for compute jobs with lower I/O demands. Each PI receives 5 TB at no cost, making it the default home for most project data.

The archive tier is low-cost cloud storage for cold data you need to retain but rarely touch and is provided through a Pitt Digital service.

Home directories (/ihome)

Separate from project storage, every user gets a personal home directory at /ihome/<primary group>/$USER, created with your account. It is your default login location and holds configuration files, logs, and user-level environments.

The quota is 75 GB per user at no cost, and it cannot be increased — keep large datasets and heavy I/O jobs in project storage rather than in $HOME.

Requesting storage

A One-time Startup Allocation provisions 5 TB of Standard (/ix) and 1 TB of Performance (/vast) storage at no cost, alongside your compute allocation. If storage wasn't set up with your account, submit a help ticket.

To go beyond the free allocation, request additional capacity through the Increase Data Storage form:

Request Beyond Cost
Performance storage initial 1 TB $85 / TB / year
Standard storage initial 5 TB $30 / TB / year

Storage is billed annually per terabyte and is separate from the compute Service Units your jobs consume. The full list of options is on the CRCD Service Request Forms page.

  • Paths, quotas & snapshots

    Full filesystem paths, per-tier quotas, snapshots, and checking usage with crc-quota.

    File Systems

  • Move data in and out

    Transfer files with Globus, rsync/scp, SFTP clients, and cloud tools.

    File Transfer Methods

  • The compute clusters

    The clusters this storage feeds, and which one fits your work.

    Our Clusters