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Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

arstechnica.com

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Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#121

Post by katane »

johngalt wrote: post #86

I've dealt with e-discovery sets. No one really has answers to what to do when you have a litigation hold on data. Legislation commonly requires "retention of anything related to X case", but how do you know what's relevant and what isn't? When you are a third party the ambiguity increases. So you end up with an everything and kitchen sink data dump. Even with everything the data is commonly useless without context.…

This isn't a problem, its the 'perfect moment' for a frighteningly ambitious, disruptive startup, per HN speak.

I think its clear that this would be a problem in an industry where the most used tool is a bookshelf of various common interpretations of law. It just doesn't scale.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#123

Post by nikcub »

dos1 wrote: post #2

In my mind, the MPAA is certainly the best choice to pay these costs. They're the ones with the problem, they should be the ones to bear the burden. Especially considering Megaupload offered to take the data and they explicitly forbade it. If the MPAA didn't like the solutions offered, but can't come up with something better, then I think Carpathia should get to do what it wants. Edit: The opinion above has NO legal…

they MPAA can pay for it from a small part of the huge new profits they are seeing after stoping this international pirating operation.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#124

Post by nikcub »

tripzilch wrote: post #104

So, 25 petabytes ... 25 million gigabytes. Anyone care to guess how much of this data is illegitimate? And how much of that is under MPAA's copyright? Back-of-the-envelope calculation: Just did a search for "1080" on some unnamed site and it appears a bluray rip of a movie encodes to roughly 10GB. So that would be 2.5 million movies in 1080p quality. I don't think we've made that many, have we? Especially if you cons…

Megaupload has multiple copies of almost every single movie and TV show in the world in multiple formats and quality levels.

I have watched some very rare international films on Mega and it never failed me on a search.

If you multiply out all the movies, all the multiple copies, all the TV show espisodes, all the different quality levels, you would get a few petabytes.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#125

Post by nikcub »

thezilch wrote: post #105
tripzilch wrote: post #104

So, 25 petabytes ... 25 million gigabytes. Anyone care to guess how much of this data is illegitimate? And how much of that is under MPAA's copyright? Back-of-the-envelope calculation: Just did a search for "1080" on some unnamed site and it appears a bluray rip of a movie encodes to roughly 10GB. So that would be 2.5 million movies in 1080p quality. I don't think we've made that many, have we? Especially if you cons…

Frankly, the idea of pinning MPAA's actions on mostly protecting porn is a brilliant angle to fight back with in political arenas, where MPAA tries to draw human emotions and claims pirates are taking jobs away from honest people and our children are in trouble if pirates keep sharing their works. Save your children; MPAA cares mostly to keep servicing them porn; end them now!

don't jump in the mud with them, keep yourself clean and argue user rights and freedom.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#126

Post by nikcub »

njharman wrote: post #78
VikingCoder wrote: post #70

Help me out with the math here: 1 terabyte costs them $128.41 per year, right? Amazon S3 would cost them roughly $444 per year, if they were using the Reduced Redundancy Storage. The cheapest HD that I see on pcpartpicker (in terms of Price/GB) is the Western Digital Caviar Green 2.5 TB (5400 RPM) for $135.43, which is $0.054/GB. That's $54.17 per TB. If you want a single backup, that's $108.34 per TB. Two backups (3…

The hardware cost 1.25 million. It cost $9000/day in electricity/connectivity/rackspace.

they need to get a lawyer and work out the real cost. add in lost business opportunity, staff costs, brand damange etc. and you start hitting numbers where the government would have to do something and you may actually start getting compensated.

it is bullshit that they have to foot such a large cost for a government investigation.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#127

Post by slowpoke »

nikcub wrote: post #123
dos1 wrote: post #2

In my mind, the MPAA is certainly the best choice to pay these costs. They're the ones with the problem, they should be the ones to bear the burden. Especially considering Megaupload offered to take the data and they explicitly forbade it. If the MPAA didn't like the solutions offered, but can't come up with something better, then I think Carpathia should get to do what it wants. Edit: The opinion above has NO legal…

they MPAA can pay for it from a small part of the huge new profits they are seeing after stoping this international pirating operation.

>the huge new profits they are seeing after stoping this international pirating operation.

I seriously hope that was sarcasm.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#128

Post by itmag »

shrike wrote: post #81

The federal government does have a process for this sort of thing, if they seize an alleged drug dealer's house and that house has a mortgage the United States Marshals Service will pay the mortgage. If they seize cars, furniture, other assets the government is responsible for the storage of those items until the case has been resolved. [1] I would guess that MegaUpload's lawyers will make the claim that the data on…

  1. Purchase uber-expensive mansion and set up an astronomic mortgage payment/month.
  2. Get said domicile seized by US gov't.
  3. Stall legal proceedings until Marshals have paid off the entire house.
  4. ???
  5. Profit!

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#129

Post by yardie »

ma2rten wrote: post #61
samstave wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming 2TB internal HDD's at $120.00 per piece, you would need $1.5MM worth of drives to transfer this to. Not including the man-hours associated with doing so. The $3.2MM per year is actually sounding a lot more reasonable to keep it up and running.

Wow, I bother to calculate it. However, - if you buy HDDs in these quantities you will get a big discount (50%+) - they most likely get the HDDs back after the case is finished, but not the electricity bill. - you have to factor in opportunity costs from not being able to rent out that rackspace. - I don't even understand how this can be proper evidence if it just hangs around at a private company.

* HDDs have some of the lowest margins in the components business. If you're buying from Newegg you're basically getting it at cost (unless there is some conspiracy by all warehouse retailers to keep the price at >$100).

* It's the chain of custody that is important not who keeps it. Most LEOs outsource to various contractors for all types of investigations.

Re: Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

#130

Post by CoryMathews »

astrodust wrote: post #90
johngalt wrote: post #86

I've dealt with e-discovery sets. No one really has answers to what to do when you have a litigation hold on data. Legislation commonly requires "retention of anything related to X case", but how do you know what's relevant and what isn't? When you are a third party the ambiguity increases. So you end up with an everything and kitchen sink data dump. Even with everything the data is commonly useless without context.…

If it's anything like the usual proceedings, the lawyers involved would probably prefer if they had several copies of the data, too. I'm sure most of these drives were arrayed in such a fashion where they're unreadable unless in the proper equipment. It's not like you can just buy a pile of off-the-shelf external drives and start copying, either, as the contents might be unreadable unless the proper software is insta…

Wouldn't making more copies of the files be exactly why they are taking the site down in the first place?
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