3 ms·

One issue is that you are always paying for power. Some back of the napkin calculations indicate that Backblaze's prices are low enough that it's not worth it t

One issue is that you are always paying for power. Some back of the napkin calculations indicate that Backblaze's prices are low enough that it's not worth it to compete unless you are getting more than 1 terrabyte per 30 watts as otherwise the power costs alone would kill you. That's going to be a pretty hard target to hit with "spare free resources" (not to mention hardware degradation and capital costs).

p1necone 7y ago
You're always paying for power regardless of whether you're offering your unused drive space on a distributed system.
- klodolph 7y ago
  Hard drives consume less power when idle, like CPUs.
  - p1necone 7y ago
    I imagine that extra power consumption has to be less than the combination of non idle HDDs and all of the other infrastructure at backblaze, no? And they're still going to be idle most of the time. And there's the added likelihood that people providing hdd space on filecoin are not going to even measure the impact of extra power consumption, they're just going to notice the revenue. (Not that this is a good thing, if someone was losing money, they should know)
klodolph 7y ago
Agreed. Cloud storage is a commodity race to the bottom. Cloud providers want you to use their storage systems because it means that you’ll also use their more profitable associated services in order to save money on egress. Accumulate enough data, and you’re locked in because of the high cost to migrate. Because IO dominates so many workloads, you already get a bunch of bytes for cheap when you are running a cloud storage provider. It’s already dirt cheap and potentially a loss leader (I suspect). So, I have a hard time seeing how “spare free resources” are going to be competitive when you factor in the network, capital costs, power, etc. Then there’s some unknown legal risk that you are e.g. accepting money to distribute child porn to people, just like there’s a legal risk associated with running a Tor node (not commenting on whether this is just or not). Just my opinion. Not speaking on behalf of anyone here.

p1necone 7y ago

You're always paying for power regardless of whether you're offering your unused drive space on a distributed system.

klodolph 7y ago
Hard drives consume less power when idle, like CPUs.
- p1necone 7y ago
  I imagine that extra power consumption has to be less than the combination of non idle HDDs and all of the other infrastructure at backblaze, no? And they're still going to be idle most of the time. And there's the added likelihood that people providing hdd space on filecoin are not going to even measure the impact of extra power consumption, they're just going to notice the revenue. (Not that this is a good thing, if someone was losing money, they should know)

klodolph 7y ago

Agreed. Cloud storage is a commodity race to the bottom. Cloud providers want you to use their storage systems because it means that you’ll also use their more profitable associated services in order to save money on egress. Accumulate enough data, and you’re locked in because of the high cost to migrate. Because IO dominates so many workloads, you already get a bunch of bytes for cheap when you are running a cloud storage provider. It’s already dirt cheap and potentially a loss leader (I suspect). So, I have a hard time seeing how “spare free resources” are going to be competitive when you factor in the network, capital costs, power, etc. Then there’s some unknown legal risk that you are e.g. accepting money to distribute child porn to people, just like there’s a legal risk associated with running a Tor node (not commenting on whether this is just or not). Just my opinion. Not speaking on behalf of anyone here.