Ha! There was also Apache S4 - a distributed stream processing framework from Yahoo! But it was retired before leaving the incubator a very long time ago.
If you look closely, you’ll see it’s not actually a page at all, but a screenshot of a page… with all the images broken. Top marks for the jokes within jokes and whoever put this all together. It’s definitely given me a really good chuckle tonight!
I believe they have overestimated the cost of using 3.5" floppies, probably to make themselves look better by comparison.
They give the cost as $211,172, but that's the cost to buy a 1 TiB pack of floppies. Their own storage cost is per-month, so to get the equivalent cost for floppies you need to also divide by the expected useful lifetime of a floppy disk. I did a web search for "floppy disk lifetime" and the internet [1] told me "I’ve seen numbers saying the lifespan of floppy disks is three to five years. But I’ve also seen numbers that claim they can last ten to twenty years or even indefinitely."
If you assume floppy disks have an expected lifetime of 5 years, you can amortise the cost across that time, bringing the cost per TiB-month down to a nice reasonable $3,520.
Since we have multiple points of data for lifespan, perhaps we should be computing a weighted average between them?
Going by gut feel: 3-5 years sounds like "pretty likely", let's give that 95% of the weight, at 4 years for simplicity. 10-20 years would be nice, but really, how much tech lasts that long? Not much. How about 4.9999999% at 15 years. And the remaining can go to "indefinitely", which seems pretty darn unlikely, so it has 0.0000001% weight.
(4*95+15*4.9999999+∞*0.0000001 / 100) = ∞
I guess we can ignore the monthly cost ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I applied weights to things, so this is Bayesian, and we all know that's always right.
Just roll them in a nice soft blanket. I have one that keeps me warm even in plain winter. We can add a hot chocolate cup and that should do the trick.
i believe there is an opportunity in the market for an advanced data storage technology to support writing huge volumes of information to a single 3.5" floppy, provided the legacy constraint of offering a read operation can be dispensed with.
Given my own experience with 3.5" floppies in the past often yielded lifetimes in single digit months, I would say any estimate of years needs to have a very large error margin, and you need to use RAIF.
Since this is a write-only service, it doesn't actually matter if the disk stops working, or even ceases to exist. Therefore we may be able to estimate the lifespan as infinite.
There may also be no need to purchase more than one disk. In fact taken to its logical conclusion there is no need to purchase any disk at all - but of course that brings us all the way to the S4 business model itself.
I don't think comparing a service like S4 to a non-existing disk is fair. Especially in enterprise software, I often get the requirement that the data is reliably written. I can easily point an auditor to the S4 service contract and SLAs to prove we fulfill this. A bespoke arrangement of floppy drives and shredders might pass if the auditor's having a good day. But removing the disks entirely? That will never fly.
You've got to wonder how it would work if taken to the extreme: rack after rack of floppy drives filling an entire data centre providing a glacially-slow S3 service.
Can you imagine the noise? It would be... glorious.
They're 5.75 x 4.25 x 0.75 inches. So if you mount them vertically like in high-density storage arrays, you can fit 25 of them into the width of a rack, about 7 rows from the front to back. So... about 175 per layer that is about 4 RU high including the space for the controller board. You can fit 10 of these layers in a standard rack, for 1,750 floppy drives total per rack.
Let's see... that's 2.52 GB per rack! Seek times are variable depending on the floppy drive model, but 250 ms is approximately correct for the average. So about 7,000 IOPS total per rack. Not too shabby!
A decent sized data centre might have 1,000 racks. So a "cloud-scale" floppy drive object storage system might have 2.52 TB of raw storage. However, you have to divide that by three for the redundant copies, so we're back to 840 GB of usable storage capacity per floor, but with an impressive 7M IOPS.
To put things in perspective, that's directly equivalent to a single modern laptop SSD drive in terms of both capacity and IOPS. Except that the latency of the SSD is 5000x lower.
But at 25kbps sustained write (inc optimistic disk juggling) it'd take 463 days to write 1TB. If that's your comparison number, you'd need to factor in 17 drives running in parallel to write 1tb in February. And a robot, or 6 people to handle disks. And 14m³ archive space.
And double all that if you want redundancy.
But the abacus beads could store rotational data. There's at least 8 bits of data there, more if you can put some time in. That's free real estate there.
I'm guessing this is a competitor to S3 Glacier Deep Archive since you aren't meant to read from it. They don't seem to provide information on how you get your data out. Maybe they will mail your drives with your data?
Nah, that's why they're so cheap even compared to the competition. There is no read option. There's effectively no cost because there's no retrieval infrastructure!
(In case you completely missed it, this site is satire, similar to /dev/null-as-a-service, etc)
Maybe someone should to an Ask HN: what happens when you request your S3 glacier data. I use it, but frankly it seems more like a protection racket given the costs of getting anything out of there.
How do you figure? Looks pretty legit. Their storage imagery is a picture of multiple save icons... I mean, what else could they do to show how well they can store data?
Do the response messages have anything to do with the ability to read the data? It seems normal for an API to report back common data like status message, number of bytes written, etc. It doesn't mean anything about reading the data itself
If I recall, this was announced at a Meetup event. Halfway through, amidst the giggles, there was an awkward moment when the hosts realized some of the audience thought it was a real service.
Fact check: The cost of S3 standard storage per TB is approximately $23 not $153.
S3 standard storage, the most expensive kind, is $.021-.023 per GB.
S4 costs about the same as S3 Deep Archive storage.
Update: The article appears to be a joke. That aside, there are no cost savings against S3 Deep Archive; additionally S3 Deep Archive supports restores unlike the write-only S4.
> S3 Deep Archive supports restores unlike the write-only S4
I bet that a Super service like this may also support restores, but because of security reasons, they would only be internally and not be visible to the end user.
The site's domain was registered in 2009, and I guess it hasn't been updated since then. Their 1TB S3 price is in line with S3's 2008 price of $0.15/GB, and many (all?) of S3's advanced pricing tiers wouldn't have debuted yet.
Reminds of the Mitch Hedberg joke “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.”: “It appears to be a joke. It actually is a joke, but appears to be one too.”
It's hard to remember now, but there was a period of time not long ago when "the cloud" hadn't yet become an overused catchphrase. In those heady days of yore, people used to store things themselves – usually only on one device, and uphill both ways. These were hardscrabble people, living off of whatever meager storage they could scrounge together. They’d zip things, put them on zip drives, and hope for the best. Then one day almost everyone looked up towards the metaphorical sky and made a lot of compromises.
165 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] thread...and then I clicked on the PayPal link :)
my s4: https://github.com/nathants/s4
They give the cost as $211,172, but that's the cost to buy a 1 TiB pack of floppies. Their own storage cost is per-month, so to get the equivalent cost for floppies you need to also divide by the expected useful lifetime of a floppy disk. I did a web search for "floppy disk lifetime" and the internet [1] told me "I’ve seen numbers saying the lifespan of floppy disks is three to five years. But I’ve also seen numbers that claim they can last ten to twenty years or even indefinitely."
If you assume floppy disks have an expected lifetime of 5 years, you can amortise the cost across that time, bringing the cost per TiB-month down to a nice reasonable $3,520.
[1] https://blog.storagecraft.com/data-storage-lifespan/
Going by gut feel: 3-5 years sounds like "pretty likely", let's give that 95% of the weight, at 4 years for simplicity. 10-20 years would be nice, but really, how much tech lasts that long? Not much. How about 4.9999999% at 15 years. And the remaining can go to "indefinitely", which seems pretty darn unlikely, so it has 0.0000001% weight.
(4*95+15*4.9999999+∞*0.0000001 / 100) = ∞
I guess we can ignore the monthly cost ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I applied weights to things, so this is Bayesian, and we all know that's always right.
Plus, when you’re done writing your data, you’ll have a fancy drink coaster!
There may also be no need to purchase more than one disk. In fact taken to its logical conclusion there is no need to purchase any disk at all - but of course that brings us all the way to the S4 business model itself.
You've got to wonder how it would work if taken to the extreme: rack after rack of floppy drives filling an entire data centre providing a glacially-slow S3 service.
Can you imagine the noise? It would be... glorious.
The linked article used these compact drives: https://www.amazon.com/External-Floppy-1-44MB-FDUSB-M-V1/dp/...
They're 5.75 x 4.25 x 0.75 inches. So if you mount them vertically like in high-density storage arrays, you can fit 25 of them into the width of a rack, about 7 rows from the front to back. So... about 175 per layer that is about 4 RU high including the space for the controller board. You can fit 10 of these layers in a standard rack, for 1,750 floppy drives total per rack.
Let's see... that's 2.52 GB per rack! Seek times are variable depending on the floppy drive model, but 250 ms is approximately correct for the average. So about 7,000 IOPS total per rack. Not too shabby!
A decent sized data centre might have 1,000 racks. So a "cloud-scale" floppy drive object storage system might have 2.52 TB of raw storage. However, you have to divide that by three for the redundant copies, so we're back to 840 GB of usable storage capacity per floor, but with an impressive 7M IOPS.
To put things in perspective, that's directly equivalent to a single modern laptop SSD drive in terms of both capacity and IOPS. Except that the latency of the SSD is 5000x lower.
https://youtu.be/G-X-p0C0Uas
But a 1 TB HDD and an associated Linux system would probably cost about 300 USD.
Assuming a lifespan of about 7 years, monthly cost comes to about 3 USD per month.
And double all that if you want redundancy.
But the abacus beads could store rotational data. There's at least 8 bits of data there, more if you can put some time in. That's free real estate there.
By the way the upload example form is broken, making it actually work would be awesome
(In case you completely missed it, this site is satire, similar to /dev/null-as-a-service, etc)
Read time for me has been measured in minutes or sub hour, but the data isn’t huge.
http://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/cool-products/images/signet...
Durability is one of the headaches you can ignore with a write only interface.
This is a write-only resource…
Now, you could in theory store SHA hashes on a block chain to confirm that the files were written.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-only_memory_(engineering...
> Key Scenarios: Customer complaint database Covert government document storage SETI@home output recorder Personal diary entries Unpublished manuscripts
> Case Studies MotherInLawPhotos.com
S4 costs about the same as S3 Deep Archive storage.
Update: The article appears to be a joke. That aside, there are no cost savings against S3 Deep Archive; additionally S3 Deep Archive supports restores unlike the write-only S4.
I bet that a Super service like this may also support restores, but because of security reasons, they would only be internally and not be visible to the end user.
The resource cannot be read
The resource you are trying to access cannot be read, due to the following reason:
No read operation available.
There is a reason why storage is hard and why I only trust big techs to do it
It's hard to remember now, but there was a period of time not long ago when "the cloud" hadn't yet become an overused catchphrase. In those heady days of yore, people used to store things themselves – usually only on one device, and uphill both ways. These were hardscrabble people, living off of whatever meager storage they could scrounge together. They’d zip things, put them on zip drives, and hope for the best. Then one day almost everyone looked up towards the metaphorical sky and made a lot of compromises.
https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
https://youtu.be/0_PK1eDQyVg
Always cracks me up, never gets old.