If they're aggressive enough, I'd say there could justifiably be a quite large latency. Say for example their block size is 55 disks with 10% redundancy. Then t

If they're aggressive enough, I'd say there could justifiably be a quite large latency. Say for example their block size is 55 disks with 10% redundancy. Then the seek time is the maximum seek time of the lowest 50 seek times within the set of disks which haven't failed. Now there's a queue to read each drive, and it may very well frequently be a huge maximum queue pretty much every time. Even if the queue is typically short, they would still have to show a typical high value, which I'd say is essentially read time of an entire disk. Now factor that the disks are both large and crappy. A 120 Mb/s read speed and 1Tb disk size would imply 8000 secs ~ 2 hours. Factor possibility of differential pricing as you mentioned (even longer queues), and you may get an upper bound of 3 or 4 hours. I'm just speculating though.