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I'm anxiously waiting for that moment where cloud storage becomes cheaper than buying a hard drive. Only at that point will consider I going all-cloud.

ntoshev 15y ago
Google Docs storage is $0.25 / GB * year. A random 1TB drive on Newegg was $0.17 / GB. Depending on you utilization and amortization schedule, it may be worth it.
- nknight 15y ago
  $170? That's a damned expensive 1TB HDD. Most are under $130, and that's still inflated due to Thailand. Also, 1TB hasn't been the sweet spot for a while. 2TB drives are coming in under $140 now, $0.07/GB.
  - afterburner 15y ago
    3TB squeaking in just under that too, $0.65/GB: http://ncix.com/products/?sku=67447&vpn=WD30EZRS&manufacture=Western%20Digital%20WD http://ncix.com/products/?sku=67447&vpn=WD30EZRS&man... Before the Thailand floods, I was eyeing that drive for $130 ($0.04/GB) and thinking "can't go wrong waiting until I really need it." And obviously, comparing to cloud strictly on price, you can divide that cost by the number of years you expect to keep that drive... so then it likely drops to less than 1 cent per GB per year.
    - sherbondy 15y ago
      *$0.065/GB
  - rogerbinns 15y ago
    > $170? That's a damned expensive 1TB HDD. Google's price includes the electricity to run the disk, any enclosures, network connectivity, whatever CPU is needed to front end it, dealing with any warranty & maintenance issues, backups and backup media and who knows how many other items in addition to the bare metal. If you want to do an apples to apples price comparison then some of those factors should also be factored in to the NewEgg price!
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - bscanlan 15y ago
      Not to mention redundancy - Google certainly do not store your docs on one hard drive.
sliverstorm 15y ago
I'm waiting for the moment where a cloud machine with extremely modest specs and traffic becomes as cheap as running a junkyard PC from my basement. Junkyard PC's are always cheap, but I keep thinking with economies of scale they'd be able to carve out 64MB RAM/2GB disk/100MHz for $10-20/year.
- rb2k_ 15y ago
  lowendbox.com is your friend for that kind of stuff
dinkumthinkum 15y ago
As a heavy EC2 user, you have got to think about the performance ramifications. EC2 EBS disks are abysmal in terms of performance.
- rogerbinns 15y ago
  I keep wondering why Amazon doesn't fix this. The problem isn't so much the baseline performance which isn't stellar but can be designed to, but rather the massive variance in performance that arbitrarily changes moment to moment.
  - rdl 15y ago
    Arbitrary configuration networked disk is Hard, probably harder than anything else AWS does. Enterprise still spends a lot on storage (generally big hardware RAIDs, dedicated storage area networks, etc.). 1 GB of enterprise storage might cost 50-100x the base per-GB cost of the cheapest SATA disk, by the time you include all the costs. No AWS customer wants to pay that much of a premium. You can often build a storage system for a very specific purpose more more cheaply (maybe 3x the base drive cost?), like the Backblaze pods, or just figure the cost of adding 4-8 x SATA drives and software RAID 10 to each of your servers, but then you get to try to solve the filesystem problem, and have weird performance characteristics. Plus, if you think EBS reliability is bad (it is), wait for the joy of statistically significant number of spinning rust drives in anything not designed with enough redundancy, and where some failures are correlated (trays failing at the same time, controller bugs, ...). One of Google's big advantages was always their Google File System. And GFS is a lot better for the specific loads in search than for the kind of loads applications like gmail impose. Local instance storage is really the only performant and cost effective thing. You can hang a lot more direct attached disk off your own server than off any AWS instance (1.7TB). The other area where AWS kind of falls down is "mad RAM" servers. I can buy 288GB RAM servers (18-slot) cheaply now (well, 144GB is cheap, 288GB is less so), and 2TB RAM is available (64-slot). AWS tops out at 68GB for about 5x the lease payments on these servers (so maybe 2x the loaded cost after Reserved Instance discounts)
    - 15y ago
jules 15y ago
Well, it certainly won't come from minor price reductions on Amazon. A dedicated server from here [1] costs €299/month for 45TB. The same on Amazon would cost ~€3400/month for storage alone. That isn't even factoring in the fact that the dedicated server also comes with CPU and traffic which you have to pay for separately on Amazon which would make it much more expensive still. Amazon's storage is also notoriously slow. Amazon would have to reduce their prices by more than a factor of 10 before they come even close. [1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/xs29 http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/xs29
ef4 15y ago
So long as the cloud-storage provider also needs to buy hard drives, that day will probably never come. Even if the provider can get better discounts buying in bulk (which won't be very much, storage is a commodity with thin margins), he's paying for a lot more than just the storage hardware.

ntoshev 15y ago

Google Docs storage is $0.25 / GB * year. A random 1TB drive on Newegg was $0.17 / GB. Depending on you utilization and amortization schedule, it may be worth it.

nknight 15y ago
$170? That's a damned expensive 1TB HDD. Most are under $130, and that's still inflated due to Thailand. Also, 1TB hasn't been the sweet spot for a while. 2TB drives are coming in under $140 now, $0.07/GB.
- afterburner 15y ago
  3TB squeaking in just under that too, $0.65/GB: http://ncix.com/products/?sku=67447&vpn=WD30EZRS&manufacture=Western%20Digital%20WD http://ncix.com/products/?sku=67447&vpn=WD30EZRS&man... Before the Thailand floods, I was eyeing that drive for $130 ($0.04/GB) and thinking "can't go wrong waiting until I really need it." And obviously, comparing to cloud strictly on price, you can divide that cost by the number of years you expect to keep that drive... so then it likely drops to less than 1 cent per GB per year.
  - sherbondy 15y ago
    *$0.065/GB
- rogerbinns 15y ago
  > $170? That's a damned expensive 1TB HDD. Google's price includes the electricity to run the disk, any enclosures, network connectivity, whatever CPU is needed to front end it, dealing with any warranty & maintenance issues, backups and backup media and who knows how many other items in addition to the bare metal. If you want to do an apples to apples price comparison then some of those factors should also be factored in to the NewEgg price!
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - bscanlan 15y ago
    Not to mention redundancy - Google certainly do not store your docs on one hard drive.

sliverstorm 15y ago

I'm waiting for the moment where a cloud machine with extremely modest specs and traffic becomes as cheap as running a junkyard PC from my basement. Junkyard PC's are always cheap, but I keep thinking with economies of scale they'd be able to carve out 64MB RAM/2GB disk/100MHz for $10-20/year.

rb2k_ 15y ago
lowendbox.com is your friend for that kind of stuff

dinkumthinkum 15y ago

As a heavy EC2 user, you have got to think about the performance ramifications. EC2 EBS disks are abysmal in terms of performance.

rogerbinns 15y ago
I keep wondering why Amazon doesn't fix this. The problem isn't so much the baseline performance which isn't stellar but can be designed to, but rather the massive variance in performance that arbitrarily changes moment to moment.
- rdl 15y ago
  Arbitrary configuration networked disk is Hard, probably harder than anything else AWS does. Enterprise still spends a lot on storage (generally big hardware RAIDs, dedicated storage area networks, etc.). 1 GB of enterprise storage might cost 50-100x the base per-GB cost of the cheapest SATA disk, by the time you include all the costs. No AWS customer wants to pay that much of a premium. You can often build a storage system for a very specific purpose more more cheaply (maybe 3x the base drive cost?), like the Backblaze pods, or just figure the cost of adding 4-8 x SATA drives and software RAID 10 to each of your servers, but then you get to try to solve the filesystem problem, and have weird performance characteristics. Plus, if you think EBS reliability is bad (it is), wait for the joy of statistically significant number of spinning rust drives in anything not designed with enough redundancy, and where some failures are correlated (trays failing at the same time, controller bugs, ...). One of Google's big advantages was always their Google File System. And GFS is a lot better for the specific loads in search than for the kind of loads applications like gmail impose. Local instance storage is really the only performant and cost effective thing. You can hang a lot more direct attached disk off your own server than off any AWS instance (1.7TB). The other area where AWS kind of falls down is "mad RAM" servers. I can buy 288GB RAM servers (18-slot) cheaply now (well, 144GB is cheap, 288GB is less so), and 2TB RAM is available (64-slot). AWS tops out at 68GB for about 5x the lease payments on these servers (so maybe 2x the loaded cost after Reserved Instance discounts)
  - 15y ago

jules 15y ago

Well, it certainly won't come from minor price reductions on Amazon. A dedicated server from here [1] costs €299/month for 45TB. The same on Amazon would cost ~€3400/month for storage alone. That isn't even factoring in the fact that the dedicated server also comes with CPU and traffic which you have to pay for separately on Amazon which would make it much more expensive still. Amazon's storage is also notoriously slow. Amazon would have to reduce their prices by more than a factor of 10 before they come even close. [1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/xs29 http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/xs29

ef4 15y ago

So long as the cloud-storage provider also needs to buy hard drives, that day will probably never come. Even if the provider can get better discounts buying in bulk (which won't be very much, storage is a commodity with thin margins), he's paying for a lot more than just the storage hardware.