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Amazon's New Storage Service

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the best-things-are-those-we-do-for-ourselves dept.

dlaur writes to tell us that today Amazon announced their Simple Storage Service (S3) allowing users to store unlimited amounts of data at $0.15 per GB paid monthly. From the article: "S3 was purportedly built to support both Amazon's own internal applications and the external users of the Amazon Web Services platform. That should be proper motivation to build a service that's fast and robust enough for mission critical use, yet flexible enough to support any storage task thrown at it."

4 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Encryption by The+Hobo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Upload truecrypt files

    Open source, cross-platform, creates a strongly encrypted file that the program can mount as a real HD, you can mount it on any platform, does transparent encryption (for example in WinXP, it mounts itself with a drive letter, you can throw stuff in directly just as if it were a real drive, and it encrypts as it goes in)

    http://www.truecrypt.org/

    You can do it in say N meg chunks or something, I guess you'd have to create a new truecrypt partition every time, but I don't really know much about it, just tried it out and it seems neat

    --
    There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
  2. Plus $0.20 per Gb transferred!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    While $0.15/Gb/month is reasonable, the poster fails to mention Amazon will also charge $0.20/Gb on transfer. So while you will pay $15/month for your 100 Gb pr0n collection, you will also pay $20 to upload it, and a further $20 to download the whole lot to your cube-buddy's computer.

    From TFA: "Apart from the storage fee, you pay $0.20 per gigabyte transferred, but there are no minimum fees and no setup costs, so you pay as you go."

    Still, not bad - but the economics for the home user are a little less ideal than first reported.

  3. Link to the actual site: by vuzman · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://aws.amazon.com/s3

  4. Tape v disc comparison by Dibblah · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not with any of the recent tape formats. They're all "serpentine" - That is, a very narrow track (up to 1/512 of the width of the tape) goes from the start to the end of the tape. The head then moves down a fraction, and writes the next track "backwards".

    This means that the seek time is reduced by up to 512x. Of course, this isn't free - Tape wear is increased since there are many, many more passes over the tape.