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Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

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Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#91
at a minimum the facility will need some power conditioning and/or insurance. you don't want a brief power surge to eat all of your capital, and lockup fees, in one go.

> For a 32 HDD system, you expect about 5 drives to fail per year. This takes time to repair and you will need on-site staff (just not 24/7). To account for these costs, we will budget $50 per year per rig.

will you not also lose 6TB (times utilization) of your lockup every time a drive dies?

> 8x 4 way SATA data splitters

you've linked to SAS breakout cables. they don't plug into SATA ports, they plug into SFF-8087 SAS ports.

they cannot plug into the motherboard you've listed. nor have I ever seen one listed for retail sale that has 8 SFF-8087 ports.

the cheapest way to get 8 SFF-8087 ports is with some SAS expander card, and a SAS HBA. even scraping off eBay that's another $50 per host, and two more components to fail.

there are also actual SATA expanders out there, but they last about 3 months before catastrophic failure in my experience.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#93
post #82

I work in telecom/datacenter infrastructure and this is fanciful. The whole way they take the wattage load of one machine and then hand wave away all of the rest of the costs of either building and running a datacenter, or paying ongoing monthly colocation costs... Is just scary. I truly don't mean to offend anyone but this looks like a bunch of enthusiastic dilettantes. Generators? UPS? Cooling costs? Square footage…

They're not talking about a datacenter. Datacenters need to be reliable. Sia storage pools don't, because security and reliability is achieved at the global network level, not at the level of individual systems or storage pools. 95% reliability means you can be down for two whole weeks out of every year and still be well within acceptable uptime requirements. Generators? Who needs those? Just wait for the power to co…

Who are the customers for such unreliable systems?

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#94
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third sentence of your Medium article says; "Despite this, the Sia network is able to achieve 99.9999% uptime for files." How do you achieve this in a "not a highly reliable facility"?

Redundancy, I assume. Lots of unreliable facilities and nodes can be very durable in aggregate.

Sounds kinda like the people who thought that bundling a bunch of bad mortgage debt together in slices could get it rated AAA.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is a terabyte of dropbox storage?

Dropbox is $10/TB/mo, which is the "old" industry standard (and still what most big guys charge). Backblaze is $5, but they charge egress fees, so usage matters. Dropbox doesn't charge for egress, but there are limits on "Public" folder bandwidth (and you can't pay for more if you max out). I don't think there are limits on private content, but I bet there's a soft throttle or some limit that will get you contacted.…

Surely you mean Mbit, unless you’re streaming uncompressed video for some reason! :)

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#96
post #27

How did they go from 8 SATA ports to 32 SATA devices? The linked cable uses a SAS host/connector. Was a SAS card left out of the parts list?

Using "8x 4 way SATA data splitters". What i don't get is why they don't use 14TB HDDs, they are only 15% more expensive per TB. On the other hand they'd need 2.33x less PCs at $550 each, plus their power use. So instead of every 7 PCs with 6TB HDDs they'd need 3 with 14TB HDDs. PS: They could also use a mainboard with 10 SATA ports instead of 8. They are only $15 more than the chosen board. Adding one or more PCIe 8…

> Using "8x 4 way SATA data splitters".

There's no such thing as a passive SATA data splitter.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#97

Wait, how are they connecting 32 drives to that motherboard? They seem to be implying they are splitting each SATA plug 4 ways, which as far as I know is impossible. The adapter they're linking to is SF8087 to 4x SATA, not SATA to 4x SATA (which shouldn't exist). That motherboard doesn't have SF8087, it has 8 SATA3 connections. Unless I've missed something big, SF8087 can not be plugged into SATA3.

It cannot. I assume there’s an HBA thrown in the mix somewhere they did not mention.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#98
post #32

Top of Hacker News and there's nothing clickable above the fold that takes me to the SIA website. Content marketers and technical marketers - don't miss the opportunity on Medium and other platforms to at VERY LEAST link to your homepage in the first section. In fact that is at the top of this awesome piece of content marketing is a "Sign Up" button for Medium . . .

I ended up at https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia and there's no activity in the last two years, the latest issues are a few "you broke my wallet with the update and my password doesn't work" from 2018.

Yeah, they moved to gitlab: https://gitlab.com/NebulousLabs/Sia

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#99
post #32

Top of Hacker News and there's nothing clickable above the fold that takes me to the SIA website. Content marketers and technical marketers - don't miss the opportunity on Medium and other platforms to at VERY LEAST link to your homepage in the first section. In fact that is at the top of this awesome piece of content marketing is a "Sign Up" button for Medium . . .

I ended up at https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia and there's no activity in the last two years, the latest issues are a few "you broke my wallet with the update and my password doesn't work" from 2018.

They’re on GitLab now.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the issue. We know that due to economy of scale and domain experience, AWS will always have the lowest cost (to Amazon) for storage -- whether that's totally-reliable storage, or sorta-reliable. If there was a demand for sorta-reliable, they'd build a sorta-reliable S3 and undercut you. Then, blockchain adds inefficiency. Therefore, it's basically impossible for any blockchain solution to have a lower total co…

Everybody with more money than you can always undercut you in anything you ever do so why bother ever trying to do anything

My point is taking something, adding inefficiency, then pronouncing it's "cheapest in class" isn't logically possible.
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