a while back i wondered about the same thing ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787770 ). It did occur later t

a while back i wondered about the same thing ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787770 ). It did occur later to me that S3/Google Cloud Storage and Archive/Backblaze are really not the same thing. S3/GCS is FAST. Backblaze, for example, has two gigabit ethernet ports for their new 180TB pod. That means, even assuming no overhead, copying 1 POD to another will take ~9 days! Even were they to add additional/faster ports/interconnects, the 45 drives in a POD are still sitting on a PCIe 2.0 8x, thus with a theoretical throughput of 4GB/s, thats still half a day. Now, I do not know how many drives Amazon/Google load into their S3/GCS servers, but my (dayjob) live storage servers rarely have more than 4 - 8 drives each. Even if we assume 8, thats a 5-6 fold increase in theoretical throughput - and THAT is why S3/GCS will never be in the same pricing zone as Backblaze. S3/GCS, even Backupsy, DO, etc are all "live" storage solutions, and seems most are converging to ~3 cents/GB-month. Backblaze is "archival" storage, and will (probably) continue to be cheaper by a factor of 5-10 (or its won't be worth the hassle).