I thought they already allowed you to mail in hard drives?
Amazon Snowball
11–20 of 202 posts
Re: Amazon Snowball
#12The XKCD about FedEx's bandwidth seems particularly appropriate: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
His MicroSD card calculations are off because it would take a month to insert an airplane-load of those cards one by one into some computer to copy them into your storage.
Which also makes me wonder why this Snowball device only does Ethernet. Seems like it should have an eSATA port.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#13I thought they already allowed you to mail in hard drives?
They did but you had to buy them yourself and most of the times you didn't have a use for them after. With snowball they manage the process end to end.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#14Isn't this a bit risky? What happens if someone keeps it? 50TB is a lot more than $200.
"The data will be 256-bit encrypted on the host and stored on the appliance in encrypted form", key is stored in KMS, according to https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...
Re: Amazon Snowball
#15Getting terabytes of data into AWS/Hotel California is great, but wish there was a way to get the data out just as quickly!
Re: Amazon Snowball
#16In my last role we would often need to upload large amounts of data for our clients to AWS. When this data got into the terabytes we would ship a NAS box to our customer and then send that to Amazon. On more than one occasion Amazon fubar'ed the upload on their end (why would you move drives around in a RAID 5/6 array?). Maybe since this is AWS branded solution it will be more reliable.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#17I'm curious about how they're going to approach this from the fraud perspective. This is a $200 charge for a device that has 50TB storage, which would probably cost you around $2000 to buy.
There's people out there that will sign a contract under a fake name / address with a phone provider and sell the phones, and the way the providers fight against it usually by running credit checks and verifying address against them. Ultimately, this is very hard to detect when it involves identity theft.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#18Isn't this a bit risky? What happens if someone keeps it? 50TB is a lot more than $200.
It might not be the best idea to steal from someone who has your full name and credit card, which Amazon does for AWS customers as far as I know.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#19Isn't this a bit risky? What happens if someone keeps it? 50TB is a lot more than $200.
I assume they have your credit card and will charge you a larger amount if they don't get it back.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#20Isn't this a bit risky? What happens if someone keeps it? 50TB is a lot more than $200.
The customer won't keep it because the Snowball contract will put them on the hook for it.
Whether the shippers do or don't keep it, there are much more valuable things shipped every day. Where do you think the gargantuan Catalyst and Nexus switches come from? The line cards in those things probably cost more than a Snowball device.