I believe they have overestimated the cost of using 3.5" floppies, probably to make themselves look better by comparison.
They give the cost as $211,172, but that's the cost to buy a 1 TiB pack of floppies. Their own storage cost is per-month, so to get the equivalent cost for floppies you need to also divide by the expected useful lifetime of a floppy disk. I did a web search for "floppy disk lifetime" and the internet [1] told me "I’ve seen numbers saying the lifespan of floppy disks is three to five years. But I’ve also seen numbers that claim they can last ten to twenty years or even indefinitely."
If you assume floppy disks have an expected lifetime of 5 years, you can amortise the cost across that time, bringing the cost per TiB-month down to a nice reasonable $3,520.
You've got to wonder how it would work if taken to the extreme: rack after rack of floppy drives filling an entire data centre providing a glacially-slow S3 service.
Can you imagine the noise? It would be... glorious.
They're 5.75 x 4.25 x 0.75 inches. So if you mount them vertically like in high-density storage arrays, you can fit 25 of them into the width of a rack, about 7 rows from the front to back. So... about 175 per layer that is about 4 RU high including the space for the controller board. You can fit 10 of these layers in a standard rack, for 1,750 floppy drives total per rack.
Let's see... that's 2.52 GB per rack! Seek times are variable depending on the floppy drive model, but 250 ms is approximately correct for the average. So about 7,000 IOPS total per rack. Not too shabby!
A decent sized data centre might have 1,000 racks. So a "cloud-scale" floppy drive object storage system might have 2.52 TB of raw storage. However, you have to divide that by three for the redundant copies, so we're back to 840 GB of usable storage capacity per floor, but with an impressive 7M IOPS.
To put things in perspective, that's directly equivalent to a single modern laptop SSD drive in terms of both capacity and IOPS. Except that the latency of the SSD is 5000x lower.
Since this is a write-only service, it doesn't actually matter if the disk stops working, or even ceases to exist. Therefore we may be able to estimate the lifespan as infinite.
There may also be no need to purchase more than one disk. In fact taken to its logical conclusion there is no need to purchase any disk at all - but of course that brings us all the way to the S4 business model itself.
I don't think comparing a service like S4 to a non-existing disk is fair. Especially in enterprise software, I often get the requirement that the data is reliably written. I can easily point an auditor to the S4 service contract and SLAs to prove we fulfill this. A bespoke arrangement of floppy drives and shredders might pass if the auditor's having a good day. But removing the disks entirely? That will never fly.
Since we have multiple points of data for lifespan, perhaps we should be computing a weighted average between them?
Going by gut feel: 3-5 years sounds like "pretty likely", let's give that 95% of the weight, at 4 years for simplicity. 10-20 years would be nice, but really, how much tech lasts that long? Not much. How about 4.9999999% at 15 years. And the remaining can go to "indefinitely", which seems pretty darn unlikely, so it has 0.0000001% weight.
(4*95+15*4.9999999+∞*0.0000001 / 100) = ∞
I guess we can ignore the monthly cost ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I applied weights to things, so this is Bayesian, and we all know that's always right.
Just roll them in a nice soft blanket. I have one that keeps me warm even in plain winter. We can add a hot chocolate cup and that should do the trick.
Given my own experience with 3.5" floppies in the past often yielded lifetimes in single digit months, I would say any estimate of years needs to have a very large error margin, and you need to use RAIF.
But at 25kbps sustained write (inc optimistic disk juggling) it'd take 463 days to write 1TB. If that's your comparison number, you'd need to factor in 17 drives running in parallel to write 1tb in February. And a robot, or 6 people to handle disks. And 14m³ archive space.
And double all that if you want redundancy.
But the abacus beads could store rotational data. There's at least 8 bits of data there, more if you can put some time in. That's free real estate there.
i believe there is an opportunity in the market for an advanced data storage technology to support writing huge volumes of information to a single 3.5" floppy, provided the legacy constraint of offering a read operation can be dispensed with.
If you look closely, you’ll see it’s not actually a page at all, but a screenshot of a page… with all the images broken. Top marks for the jokes within jokes and whoever put this all together. It’s definitely given me a really good chuckle tonight!
How do you figure? Looks pretty legit. Their storage imagery is a picture of multiple save icons... I mean, what else could they do to show how well they can store data?
Do the response messages have anything to do with the ability to read the data? It seems normal for an API to report back common data like status message, number of bytes written, etc. It doesn't mean anything about reading the data itself
> Imagine the convenience of enabling your customers to open help tickets, provide feedback, add feature requests directly to your shared, read-proof store.
Reliably deployed in production for many years at all Fortune 500s!
Lol. This is hilarious. I haven't laughed this much for ages, this had me laughing like the whole time I was reading it. Abacii and the scale transition in the graph y axis... Hahaha
Tho seriously the lack of a an IaC option means that's a hard no from me. If I can't self-host this on an on-promise open source deployment, they're just making money of people too lazy to set this up themselves with rsync and bash scripts.
"Consuming S4 is a snap with advanced integration options. Upload directly from our website, send an email, tweet your content, or simply yell in an empty room."
Which is actually a custom 403 page made to look like an old IIS error page. if you put in any url on the domain where the file does not exist you get the same error eg
If I recall, this was announced at a Meetup event. Halfway through, amidst the giggles, there was an awkward moment when the hosts realized some of the audience thought it was a real service.
Evaluating this for a client, I’m unclear on how this works with PHI under HIPAA, do I still need a BAA?
This comment started as a joke and now I’m genuinely thinking about it; also from the disk usage claims which make it clear they’re not storing the data, would a service like require a BAA? It’d have to be encrypted at rest, so assuming that was true, and assuming that the data actually got stored (presumably as cold storage) I’m thinking it’d still require BAAs…
It's kind of Schrodinger's PHI. By the time you check to see if it exists, it definitely both does and does not but not provably so either way so... there, then.
When the heck is R2 hitting general availability? In my mind it's on the verge of becoming vaporware. Although, it did have the nice side effect of increasing the amount of free egress from S3.
/dev/null may be unavailable, for example in lightweight chroot/containers without /dev. It requires extra effort and administration from our devops team. Furthermore, it's a hard-coded path and this is a well-known code smell. It's better to outsource it to a dedicated team with /dev/null expertise rather than re-inventing the wheel in-house.
Fact check: The cost of S3 standard storage per TB is approximately $23 not $153.
S3 standard storage, the most expensive kind, is $.021-.023 per GB.
S4 costs about the same as S3 Deep Archive storage.
Update: The article appears to be a joke. That aside, there are no cost savings against S3 Deep Archive; additionally S3 Deep Archive supports restores unlike the write-only S4.
The site's domain was registered in 2009, and I guess it hasn't been updated since then. Their 1TB S3 price is in line with S3's 2008 price of $0.15/GB, and many (all?) of S3's advanced pricing tiers wouldn't have debuted yet.
Reminds of the Mitch Hedberg joke “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.”: “It appears to be a joke. It actually is a joke, but appears to be one too.”
> S3 Deep Archive supports restores unlike the write-only S4
I bet that a Super service like this may also support restores, but because of security reasons, they would only be internally and not be visible to the end user.
Ha! There was also Apache S4 - a distributed stream processing framework from Yahoo! But it was retired before leaving the incubator a very long time ago.
Another example of an overpriced cloud service when a faster and cheaper solution is right in your CLI in the form of /dev/null which provides an equivalent service without the network latency and the bills!
You sound like the Dropbox guy. Sure for someone with experience like you it may be simple to set this up and maybe even faster, but some of us want to focus on our core product and not worry about this sort of thing. Knowing there's a provider I can call when something goes wrong with file uploads can be a big peace of mind.
It's hard to remember now, but there was a period of time not long ago when "the cloud" hadn't yet become an overused catchphrase. In those heady days of yore, people used to store things themselves – usually only on one device, and uphill both ways. These were hardscrabble people, living off of whatever meager storage they could scrounge together. They’d zip things, put them on zip drives, and hope for the best. Then one day almost everyone looked up towards the metaphorical sky and made a lot of compromises.
I'm guessing this is a competitor to S3 Glacier Deep Archive since you aren't meant to read from it. They don't seem to provide information on how you get your data out. Maybe they will mail your drives with your data?
Nah, that's why they're so cheap even compared to the competition. There is no read option. There's effectively no cost because there's no retrieval infrastructure!
(In case you completely missed it, this site is satire, similar to /dev/null-as-a-service, etc)
Maybe someone should to an Ask HN: what happens when you request your S3 glacier data. I use it, but frankly it seems more like a protection racket given the costs of getting anything out of there.
They give the cost as $211,172, but that's the cost to buy a 1 TiB pack of floppies. Their own storage cost is per-month, so to get the equivalent cost for floppies you need to also divide by the expected useful lifetime of a floppy disk. I did a web search for "floppy disk lifetime" and the internet [1] told me "I’ve seen numbers saying the lifespan of floppy disks is three to five years. But I’ve also seen numbers that claim they can last ten to twenty years or even indefinitely."
If you assume floppy disks have an expected lifetime of 5 years, you can amortise the cost across that time, bringing the cost per TiB-month down to a nice reasonable $3,520.
[1] https://blog.storagecraft.com/data-storage-lifespan/