Hacker News Reader

$2/GB in perpetuity is really cheap. They should write a paper about how they did it, if they haven't already.

Edit: I'm assuming they can deliver reliability and durability similar to modern cloud standards, like AWS S3.

I'd also like to see the rest of the assumptions baked in. Is there some trust fund involved -- which requires that we now consider the risk associated with how the $2 is invested to get an adequate return?

I too am a bit confused about that $2/GB for perpetuity. I'm assuming that's a loaded cost representing maintenance, backups, power. A TCO kind of number. Maybe that's a bad assumption?

It's based on the assumption that storage costs per GB will continue to decrease for their definition of "perpetuity." If you assume a consistent fall in costs, the total cost becomes a convergent series [1] and there is an upper limit even with an infinite number of years.

Suffice it to say, physics is probably going to have a lot to say about that assumption in the coming decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_series

Self built storage nodes and software for storage system, with an expectation that storage costs continue to decline per GB into the future.

beowolf cluster

Reply on news.ycombinator.com