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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

How can they give away 1TB of space for free? Because the cheapest 1TB drive I saw was $67.

Unless.. they assume that only a very small percentage of people will use it. So if on average, everyone still only uses about 1GB of space, then a 500gb you can get for $45. $45/500 = .09 so about 10 cents per person. With 25 million users that is about a $2.5 million investment.

If the average user uses 10GB then that is $1.00 per person though. With 25 million users that is about a $25 million investment.

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It's exactly the same as when GMail gave away a gigabyte of space for free. Some people said it was financially ruinous, but of course few people used anywhere close to that much, and storage prices continued to drop.

Terabytes are the new gigabytes.

Mostly because you can only upload 300MB per month in images: http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/

It'd take you 277 years to actually hit that TB with a free plan. To even use a tenth, it would take 27 years.

Edit: It appears they have removed the limit, disregard.

I don't see the 300MB limit listed anywhere on that page. Maybe they hadn't finished the site rollout?

It looks like they did, indeed, remove it just as I was posting, good for Yahoo!

At the scale that Yahoo runs, 1TB is considerably cheaper than $67/TB.

Remember that places like Yahoo and Google operate at levels where a file service issues a monitoring warning if there's less than a petabyte left.

True, but aren't they 'supposed' to buy high grade HDDs for datacenter usage?

On really large scale there's little point: disks will fail anyway all the time. It's mostly whether your maintenance plan can keep up with replacement rate.

Virtually no one will use it, and handful that use any nontrivial portion of it will draw eyeballs to the site, delivering ad revenue.

I, as a regular consumer, just got a 2TB hard drive for $90. That means the space was $45/GB compared to your $67/GB. When you buy enough hard drives to fill a data center I am sure you get better prices too! As other commenters have said, I doubt most people will use a fraction of this space.

You might get the drives cheaper, but you also need to pay for the servers to house them, and rent the space, and hire the people to replace the drives that fail, and so on. The fully loaded cost is far higher than the purchase price of the drive.

Don't forget the redundancy, too. Bit awkward having to explain to your users why you randomly lose a couple of percent of their data every year.

"When you buy enough hard drives to fill a data center I am sure you get better prices too!"

I wonder how significant that'd be?

I've got nothing except "gut feel" to back this up, but I can't help but think there's very little margin available in hard drives for even semitrailers sized orders to get significant volume discounting.

Anyone got any numbers for where the volume breaks are and what sort of discounts are available for very large hard drive orders? (I'm sort of expecting something no better than 10 or 15% in volumes up in the 10,000s...)

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