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I don't understand why this is the case, why can't they exchange the HDDs in the servers, tell the FBI to come with a big van and store the HDDs with the eviden

by ma2rten 15y ago

I don't understand why this is the case, why can't they exchange the HDDs in the servers, tell the FBI to come with a big van and store the HDDs with the evidence on it themselves in some evidence room?

DanBC 15y ago
25 petabytes of hard disc is a considerable cost. Some people have mentioned insurance. Would any policy cover you for a customer being investigated for possibly criminal activity?
- ma2rten 15y ago
  Still less than the cost of keeping all those servers up and running. I would think that from a legal point of view, like other people have pointed out, MegaUpload needs to cover the costs. They are essentially insolvent, so that is what you'd need to insure against. That it is related to a legal investigation, should not matter for the insurance coverage, imo.
- samstave 15y ago
  Assuming 2TB internal HDD's at $120.00 per piece, you would need $1.5MM worth of drives to transfer this to. Not including the man-hours associated with doing so. The $3.2MM per year is actually sounding a lot more reasonable to keep it up and running.
  - ma2rten 15y ago
    Wow, I bother to calculate it. However, - if you buy HDDs in these quantities you will get a big discount (50%+) - they most likely get the HDDs back after the case is finished, but not the electricity bill. - you have to factor in opportunity costs from not being able to rent out that rackspace. - I don't even understand how this can be proper evidence if it just hangs around at a private company.
    - samstave 15y ago
      Agreed, I was doing budgetary napkin math here... there are a lot of factors, though it does seem that the 9000/day while MAYBE 20% higher than reality is fairly realistic.
    - yardie 15y ago
      * HDDs have some of the lowest margins in the components business. If you're buying from Newegg you're basically getting it at cost (unless there is some conspiracy by all warehouse retailers to keep the price at >$100). * It's the chain of custody that is important not who keeps it. Most LEOs outsource to various contractors for all types of investigations.
  - gvb 15y ago
    I would pull out the existing drives, put them in boxes for the FBI, and power down the servers. As customers sign up for machines and storage, buy replacement drives and power up the servers with the new drives. It sounds to me like they are looking for a way to keep their income flowing with servers that they will have a hard time renting out in the near future. In other words, they just got hit with a huge excess of server capacity that they are going to have a hard time renting out short term (and probably longer term as well).
  - devicenull 15y ago
    Don't forget replacement RAID controllers! The RAID config is usually dependent on the exact drive/controller combination, so removing the drives and not saving the controller may result in them becoming inaccessible. At the very least, they would almost certainly not pass requirements to be used as evidence if that happened.
    - mbell 15y ago
      I really hope they weren't backing 25TB of data with RAID controllers, this is well out of RAID league and well into the territory of distributed file system techniques. I ditched RAID years ago for ZFS for only an 18TB file server at home. Start talking about thousands of servers and RAID is pretty useless. That said, IANAL but I think the interesting thing here is that just making copies of the hard drives is likely not enough from a evidence standpoint. With such a data set there are likely layers of data abstraction software that would be need to be replicated to make any sense of it.
- tedunangst 15y ago
  You can get insurance for "my client shafted me but I've still got bills to pay" but more typically I think you ask the client to post bond. It's called knowing your client. An ISP doing this much business with one client but not considering the possibility of MU going under is irresponsible.

by ma2rten 15y ago

DanBC 15y ago

25 petabytes of hard disc is a considerable cost. Some people have mentioned insurance. Would any policy cover you for a customer being investigated for possibly criminal activity?

ma2rten 15y ago
Still less than the cost of keeping all those servers up and running. I would think that from a legal point of view, like other people have pointed out, MegaUpload needs to cover the costs. They are essentially insolvent, so that is what you'd need to insure against. That it is related to a legal investigation, should not matter for the insurance coverage, imo.
samstave 15y ago
Assuming 2TB internal HDD's at $120.00 per piece, you would need $1.5MM worth of drives to transfer this to. Not including the man-hours associated with doing so. The $3.2MM per year is actually sounding a lot more reasonable to keep it up and running.
- ma2rten 15y ago
  Wow, I bother to calculate it. However, - if you buy HDDs in these quantities you will get a big discount (50%+) - they most likely get the HDDs back after the case is finished, but not the electricity bill. - you have to factor in opportunity costs from not being able to rent out that rackspace. - I don't even understand how this can be proper evidence if it just hangs around at a private company.
  - samstave 15y ago
    Agreed, I was doing budgetary napkin math here... there are a lot of factors, though it does seem that the 9000/day while MAYBE 20% higher than reality is fairly realistic.
  - yardie 15y ago
    * HDDs have some of the lowest margins in the components business. If you're buying from Newegg you're basically getting it at cost (unless there is some conspiracy by all warehouse retailers to keep the price at >$100). * It's the chain of custody that is important not who keeps it. Most LEOs outsource to various contractors for all types of investigations.
- gvb 15y ago
  I would pull out the existing drives, put them in boxes for the FBI, and power down the servers. As customers sign up for machines and storage, buy replacement drives and power up the servers with the new drives. It sounds to me like they are looking for a way to keep their income flowing with servers that they will have a hard time renting out in the near future. In other words, they just got hit with a huge excess of server capacity that they are going to have a hard time renting out short term (and probably longer term as well).
- devicenull 15y ago
  Don't forget replacement RAID controllers! The RAID config is usually dependent on the exact drive/controller combination, so removing the drives and not saving the controller may result in them becoming inaccessible. At the very least, they would almost certainly not pass requirements to be used as evidence if that happened.
  - mbell 15y ago
    I really hope they weren't backing 25TB of data with RAID controllers, this is well out of RAID league and well into the territory of distributed file system techniques. I ditched RAID years ago for ZFS for only an 18TB file server at home. Start talking about thousands of servers and RAID is pretty useless. That said, IANAL but I think the interesting thing here is that just making copies of the hard drives is likely not enough from a evidence standpoint. With such a data set there are likely layers of data abstraction software that would be need to be replicated to make any sense of it.
tedunangst 15y ago
You can get insurance for "my client shafted me but I've still got bills to pay" but more typically I think you ask the client to post bond. It's called knowing your client. An ISP doing this much business with one client but not considering the possibility of MU going under is irresponsible.