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Comment by wfunction | Hacker News Reader

Tangential question: What's the absolute cheapest storage per byte right now for someone who doesn't care about speed? Is it like a 4TB HDD? Any specific examples would be appreciated.

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> 4TB HDD

Yes. It's what Amazon Glacier runs on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Glacier#Storage

The Backblaze blog is also a great place to learn about a large storage deployment: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-20...

Thanks! Side question, but how is Amazon Glacier consdiered affordable? For 4TB it costs $192/year... yet you could buy two 4TB HDDs at that price yourself and use one for redundancy and the other for immediate retrieval. What's the benefit of putting your data on Glacier when it costs twice as much as keeping it yourself, and probably takes longer to retrieve too?

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

Like the rest of Amazon (excepting the Cloud Storage, which is all-you-can-eat for personal use only) - it's not affordable. Unless you might need 400 4TB drives, and keep track of which one have what on them, which are up-to-date, which are in which fire/disaster zones etc. At that point the price starts to look more reasonable.

You are comparing a single failure-prone disk to something highly-available.

It is offsite storage. If you store your backups all in the same place, then something may happen to the place like fire, flood or burglars.

But can't you put your own hard disks offsite somewhere? Just because you're holding your own backups that doesn't mean you have to be keeping them at the same location.

There's been enough comparisons between cloud vs on-prem on HN.

If all you need are two hard disks, go for it.

Why does "not cloud" imply "on the same premises"? Can't you literally store the hard disks in a separate location?

You can do whatever you want. You can even replicate AWS.

A year ago Seagate's 8TB Archive HDD was the cheapest per byte at ~210€ across different vendors.

Since then the price went up by 20% for reasons that are beyond me.

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