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Curious to know if anyone can explain why on-line storage is so expensive? Most places want $100+/mo for 1TB of storage, while a 1TB drive only costs $50. I u

Curious to know if anyone can explain why on-line storage is so expensive? Most places want $100+/mo for 1TB of storage, while a 1TB drive only costs $50. I understand there's management costs, cooling, electricity, physical space, etc. But those would be per drive costs, not per TB, and certainly wouldn't add up to $100/mo. Meanwhile, there's services like Google Drive, etc which costs about $100/yr per TB. Still exorbitant, but not as much so. 3rd party software can mount it as a drive, but only for a short period of time before the token expires. So they seem happy to sell you space at less than 1/10th the cost, as long as it's harder to use. There just seems to be a lot of cash on the table for someone to offer much cheaper storage solutions, but no one is actually doing it.

cbellew 5y ago
Don't forget the replication. S3 replicates to at least three other AZs in the same region. I know this still doesn't account for the difference but its worth remembering.
- gmiller123456 5y ago
  I can see extra features costing more, but a lot of people would be happy with nothing but a network connected drive. If it goes bad, it's bad. Hopefully I have a backup somewhere.
Dylan16807 5y ago
The big clouds have premium storage and absolutely gouge on bandwidth. For a more basic offering, B2 is $60 a year and there are other services in the same ballpark. They definitely want it to be convenient for you, and make a modest profit percentage. I haven't experienced any issues with google drive tokens, though I've mostly been using the business tier.
BugWatch 5y ago
Well, there are also data integrity issues to take into account... in the simplest terms, you'd actually need 3x the available storage to "guarantee" that there won't be any bit nor data loss if a single drive (our of three) - does... Add a potential (mandatory?) off-site backup, means of restoring it, and... Not even getting into the bandwidth cost can of worms. Again, this is in very simple (and low-scale) terms.
- BugWatch 5y ago
  bit rot, dies (my HN client offers no edit option)
- gmiller123456 5y ago
  It seems very presumptuous to assume there is no market for people who don't need all of those things. I can back up and restore my own data. Might take a while, but that should be my choice. Nor does it explain why web services like Google Drive is 1/10th the cost per TB of the same volume size on a cloud server.

cbellew 5y ago

Don't forget the replication. S3 replicates to at least three other AZs in the same region. I know this still doesn't account for the difference but its worth remembering.

gmiller123456 5y ago
I can see extra features costing more, but a lot of people would be happy with nothing but a network connected drive. If it goes bad, it's bad. Hopefully I have a backup somewhere.

Dylan16807 5y ago

The big clouds have premium storage and absolutely gouge on bandwidth. For a more basic offering, B2 is $60 a year and there are other services in the same ballpark. They definitely want it to be convenient for you, and make a modest profit percentage. I haven't experienced any issues with google drive tokens, though I've mostly been using the business tier.

BugWatch 5y ago

Well, there are also data integrity issues to take into account... in the simplest terms, you'd actually need 3x the available storage to "guarantee" that there won't be any bit nor data loss if a single drive (our of three) - does... Add a potential (mandatory?) off-site backup, means of restoring it, and... Not even getting into the bandwidth cost can of worms. Again, this is in very simple (and low-scale) terms.

BugWatch 5y ago
bit rot, dies (my HN client offers no edit option)
gmiller123456 5y ago
It seems very presumptuous to assume there is no market for people who don't need all of those things. I can back up and restore my own data. Might take a while, but that should be my choice. Nor does it explain why web services like Google Drive is 1/10th the cost per TB of the same volume size on a cloud server.