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How To Add 5.5 Petabytes and Get Banned From Costco
concealment writes with this extract from GigaOm: "'We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.' Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year. Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army."
Seriously, what a bunch of assholes.
So instead of doing the capitalistic thing and gouging with insanely high prices, the shops instead started rationing drives for a sane price so everyone could get a little bit of the very limited supply.
That was actually a really good thing to do. Instead of profiteering, they tried to make the best of a bad situation for everyone.
Then a bunch of dicks like this figure that they're more important than everyone else and that they should be able to get more than enyone else.
Selfish bastards. Nothing but scum.
After reading this I will not be giving them my money.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Run the numbers. 50 TB a day sounds like a lot, if they've only got one customer. But they're probably got "a zillion" which would imply your very thin slice of the upload bandwidth is going to be choked to like a gig per day. The upgrade in my basement from (full) 1 TB drives to 2 TB drives took around overnight, less than 24 hours anyway, but over the net at a gig per day would be about 3 years to fully convert. Even if they're not limited I would have serious problems shoving more than 100 gigs/day thru my cablemodem, so thats at least 10 days.
Another interesting thing to analyze is $5/month is $60/yr, so subtract $5/yr for electricity to spin a drive, assume a drive lives 2 years (probably much longer) that means if you can buy a drive big enough to hold everything you want for less than $110, just stick a drive in your basement. Better bandwidth and latency too, I have gigE at home but only ten or so megs of cablemodem. $110 at tiger direct will get me 2 TB. So 2 TB is approximately the tipping point, use less and you're better off "self hosting" in the basement, use more and you're better off using their service (and they're likely losing money if you use more than 2 TB).
Also I'm curious if its "unlimited" like cellphone or internet access is "unlimited" in other words they'll cut you off if they're losing money on you.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Many companies reserve the right to limit quantities. Making one customer happy by selling them every drive in stock means ticking off hundreds of others that wouldn't be able to buy the single drive they need.
I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?
There's a difference between selling at a loss, and selling below market value. For instance, if Costco signs a contract for delivery of a million drives in Feburary, the factory floods in March, and Costco gets delivery in April, their drives are suddenly worth substantially more. They can either sell them at the previously intended prices, or they can raise prices to market value. In the first case they still sell them for more than they paid, but less than market value. In the second case, they take the customer for all they're worth, and make much more profit. Rationing is the only way the first one can work, otherwise someone will come in and buy all your drives, then resell them at market value.
Who says Slashvertising doesn't work?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Website says $3.96/m for unlimited data.
Something tells me this business model will not survive without some serious bandwidth limitations. After all, if you upload is limited to 100mb then you ability to (non commercially) fill Terabytes of data is limited.
My impression(from friends who use them) is that they aim pretty heavily at home-user backup scenarios who are likely to be comparatively light users and have severely limited upstream bandwidth. They also don't do Big Serious SLAs and similar. Nor do they support things like backing up mounted NAS volumes or non Windows/OSX systems(I haven't check to see if the client is smart enough to recognize a mounted iSCSI device... It isn't exactly rocket surgery to distinguish a block device hanging from the Windows iSCSI initiatior from a block device hanging off the Intel whateverchipset SATA 2 port; but if you go with 'NAS = SMB/AFP" you'd miss it.
Still, convenient and cheap, if not as robust as solutions that cost more.
I would say at your parent's house but this being slashdot that's probably not offsite.
Regards, Phil
some hard drives (western digital, iirc) are now sold without the sata interface on the drive itself, for external models.
you rip it apart, and find out that you can't stick it onto a sata port...
I have a BLACK camera, what does that have to do with anything?