It’s Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend (we have it a month earlier than the Americans because it has roots in being grateful for a harvest and our growing season is shorter. Or something. Apparently there are lots of reasons.)
I’m thankful for many things, but one though crossed my mind earlier as I ordered some more hard drives. Five terabytes worth. I even threw in a 16 gigabyte memory stick because there was a good sale. And I did this from the cottage, on my laptop, over my cellular data plan. For less money than just about any storage, RAM or disk-based, that I’ve ever purchased before.
I’m thankful that my life is set up that I can make electronics purchases from a relaxing cottage on the lake, of course, but I’m also very aware of how lucky I am to be at a point in the technology curve where things like this are even possible – my mind drifted during the purchase to my days on a 300 baud modem, and I wondered a little how long it would take to fill that much space at that speed, and what I would possibly have been able to find to download in the ’80s to actually do that.
But that got me thinking on another tack, post-purchase. Are hard drives the new writable DVDs, and are they both ultimately short term solutions to the promise of the cloud? Would these be the last drives I ever bought?
At the moment, the numbers don’t support it, at least for personal use. Amazon S3 pricing would let me store 5 TB for about… $600 a month. Or three times the price I paid for the drives as a one time fee. If the drives lasted me 2 years under steady use, that’s a 72x multiple. More if they last longer, but I dropped on a week after buying it, so who knows?
Of course, that’s managed, redundant storage, so cut the multiple in half if I mirror the data on two separate drives. A 36x multiple then. And the replacement drives are taken care of automatically for me, so there’s value there too.
On the other hand, there’s bandwidth costs to deal with too. I don’t see a scenario where I’d download 5 TB of data a month, but my data plan at home only covers 100 gigs or so a month, and there are transfer costs from the cloud as well.
For many businesses, this kind of costing can make perfectly valid sense. For the average consumer (and moreso for their parents) it simply doesn’t, even if they’ve got a zillion hours of HD home video footage that they’d categorize as priceless.
I still believe that cloud storage is going to win over time, but the nature of what I store, access, and consume is going to have to change – some of it voluntarily by my continued anti-hoarding techniques (no, the new drives don’t necessarily help, but they’re for a specific use that will come out as a wash in the end) but also by innovation in the marketplace redefining my computing activities.
More on that experiment later, but for now I see a gap in the cloud storage economy for safe, secure, and affordable storage on the level that, say, 20% of engaged digital homes are going to need to both insure against regret and share their data with multiple computers in multiple locations.
And most of all, I’m thankful that these are the kinds of problems I have to think about, and even get paid to help solve, versus, say, making sure my family has sufficient shelter and food.
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