EBS is incredibly expensive and slow, not really a good solution. It'd be nice if they offered a better local storage option.
For higher performance, you can use
1. EBS Provisioned IOPS (kind of expensive)
2. Aurora (for DB use)
3. The new I3 instances (super fast local storage at a reasonable price.)
I guess this just boils down again to Amazon not being cost effective enough for my use case in yet another way.
Oh, and good luck creating snapshots of your home RAID!
Definitely not $50 to my knowledge but for ~$170 you can get a Samsung 850 EVO which is rated for 98k IOPS. They're fairly reliable drives and much, much faster than anything you'll get on EBS. You could be running that full 3x replication in less than a year of paying for EBS.
> Oh, and good luck creating snapshots of your home RAID!
LVM, ZFS and Btrfs all do snapshotting quite nicely. FreeNAS - commonly used for consumer grade NASes will automatically manage ZFS snapshots for you too. Amazon will sell you extra space to store snapshots, sure, but increasing the size of your devices usually solves that problem. And quite cost effectively as you can probably tell by now...
Dropbox targets end users who don't have the knowledge required to use the alternative, if you're smart enough to use EBS you're probably smart enough to use ZFS snapshotting just as easily. Or could within a day or two. It's really not that hard.
Like I said, there are systems that pretty much manage the whole thing for you and just warn you when something is about to blow up like FreeNAS.
Shadow volume replication is entirely possible with several filesystems or Hot Copy kernel mod. Also LVM does snapshotting fairly easily
I may have got my prices a bit mixed up (I saw 120GB at Fry's for $60 last month) but my point stands.
Also why is discomfort such a big problem for folks? Learn stuff.
zfs snap tank/data@$(date '+Y%m%d')
zfs send tank/data@$(date '+Y%m%d') | zfs recv backup/data
advanced magic for off-system backup
zfs send tank/data@$(date '+Y%m%d') | ssh cheapdiskserver zfs recv tank/data
So about as many as this SD card, and nothing compared to a real SSD.
SD cards have much worse write IOPS.
It is, yes, but I wouldn't refer to it as comparable to an SSD.
> SD cards have much worse write IOPS.
Surprisingly not! Testing in ATTO I got read and write speeds that were almost identical, and a peak of 2000 IOps.
EBS (gp2) is flash based, has far better performance than high end magnetic disks, with excellent latency and consistent performance. So, it's more comparable to SSD than anything else.
>Surprisingly not! Testing in ATTO I got read and write speeds that were almost identical, and a peak of 2000 IOps.
Really? Were you looking at 4K write? Typically that would be under 1 MB/s for an SD card.
http://i.imgur.com/PRoxVPM.png
It's a relatively high-quality SD card, unfortunately hampered by my reader's inability to use bus speed over 25MB/s.