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It's even worse. According to other articles [1], the total data of "G drive" was 858 TB. It's almost farcical to calculate, but AWS S3 has pricing of about $
by yongjik 1y ago
It's even worse. According to other articles [1], the total data of "G drive" was 858 TB.
It's almost farcical to calculate, but AWS S3 has pricing of about $0.023/GB/month, which means the South Korean government could have reliable multi-storage backup of the whole data at about $20k/month. Or about $900/month if they opted for "Glacier deep archive" tier ($0.00099/GB/month).
They did have backup of the data ... in the same server room that burned down [2].
[1] https://www.hankyung.com/article/2025100115651 https://www.hankyung.com/article/2025100115651
[2] https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/area/area_general/1221873.html https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/area/area_general/1221873.html
(both in Korean)
- paleotrope 1y agoThat's unfortunate.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Forgeties79 1y agoCouldn’t even be bothered to do a basic 3-2-1! Wow
- sneak 1y agoDid you expect government IT in a hierarchical respect-your-superiors-even-when-wrong society to be competent?
- Forgeties79 1y agoI mean...I feel you but holy hell dude. Nothing? Boggles the mind. Edit: my bad backups in the room is something, somehow just forgot about that part
- username332211 1y agoSouth Korea isn't some sort of backwards nation and I'm sure it's chaebols share the same culture. Having had unfortunate encounters with government IT in other countries I can bet that the root cause wasn't the national culture. It was the internal culture of "I want to do the same exact same thing I've always done until the day I retire." Absent outside pressure, civil services across the word tend advance scientifically - one funeral (or retirement) at a time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rvba 1y agoHow does this even make sense business wise for AWS? Is their cost per unit so low?
- Ekaros 1y agoWhen you start to do math, hard drive are cheap when you go for capacity and not performance. 0.00099*1000 is 0.99. So about 12$ a year. Now extrapolate something like 5 year period or 10 year period. And you get to 60 to 120$ for TB. Even at 3 to 5x redundancy those numbers start to add up.
- vbezhenar 1y agoS3 does not spend 3x drives to provide redundancy. Probably 20% more drives or something like that. They split data to chunks and use erasure coding to store them in multiple drives with little overhead.
- hapanin 1y agowait, can you elaborate on how this works?
- vbezhenar 1y agoYou have 100 bytes file. You split it into 10 chunks (data shards) and add 11-th chunk (parity shard) as XOR of all 10 chunks. Now you store every chunk on separate drive. So you have 100 bytes and you spent 110 bytes to store them all. Now you can survive one drive death, because you can recompute any missing chunk as XOR of all chunks. That's very primitive explanation, but should be easy to understand. In reality S3 uses different algorithm (probably Reed-Solomon codes) and some undisclosed number of shards (probably different for different storage classes). Some say that they use 5 of 9 (so 5 data shards + 4 parity shards which makes for 80% overhead), but I don't think it's official information.
- gundmc 1y agoAFAIK geo-replication between regions _does_ replicate the entire dataset. It sounds like you're describing RAID configurations, which are common ways to provide redundancy and increased performance within a given disk array. They definitely do that too, but within a zone
- mastax 1y agoI made an 840TB storage server last month for $15,000.
- ycombinatrix 1y ago840TB before or after configuring RAID?
- mastax 1y ago840TB raw unformatted.
- maxlin 1y agoI have almost 10% of that in my closet RAID5'd with large part of it backing up constantly to Backblaze for 10$/month, running on 10 year old hardware, with basically only the hard drives having any value ... Used a case made of cardboard till I wanted to improve the cooling, and got a used Fractal Design case for 20€. _Only_ the kind of combination of incompetence and bad politics here can lead to the kind of % of how much data has been lost here, given the policy was to only save stuff on that "G-drive" and avoid local copies. The "G-drive" they intentionally did not back up because they couldn't figure out a solution to at least store a backup across the street ...
- rasz 1y ago>AWS S3 has pricing of about $0.023/GB/month, which means ... about $20k/month or outright buying hardware capable of storing 850TB for the same $20K one time payment. Gives you some perspective on how overpriced AWS is.
- swarnie 1y agoWhere are you getting 850TB of enterprise storage for $20k? I had 500TB of object storage priced last year and it came out closer to $300k
- kachapopopow 1y ago136tb for $3k (used gen 2 epyc hardware and refurb <1 hour 16tb hdd's) they're zero risk after firmware validation and 1 full drive read and write.
- HHad3 1y agoThat's including the enterprise premium for software, hardware support, and licenses. Building this in-house using open source software (e.g. Ceph) on OEM hardware will be cheaper by an order of magnitude. You of course need people to maintain it -- the $300k turnkey solution might be the better option depending on current staff.
- mort96 1y agoPriced out by whom? What kind of object storage? Were you looking at the price of drives, or the price of a complete solution delivered by some company?
- jeroenhd 1y agoAWS? Linus Tech Tips has run multiple petabyte servers in their server closet just for sponsor money and for the cool of it. No need to outsource your national infrastructure to foreign governments, a moderate (in government terms) investment in a few racks across the country could've replicated everything for maybe half a year's worth of Amazon subscription fees.
- TheRoque 1y agoExactly, everyone here on hackernews is talking about Azure/AWS/GCP as if it was the only correct way to store data. Americans are too self centered, it's quite crazy.
- mrbadguy 1y agoYeah the comments here are slightly surreal; the issue was that they didn’t have an off-site backup at all, not that it wasn’t on AWS or whatever.
- axus 1y agoBut then they will depend on the security people at both sides to agree on the WAN configuration. Easier to let everything burn in a fire and rebuild from scratch.