Amazon Snowball

But that's the whole point: Can you trust that the box does what Amazon says it does? Because the Google box did not do what Google said it did, but if I hadn't been very insistent about it (to the point of having a number of people think I was being a total dick), we would never have known.

The service is called AWS Import/Export so it seems you probably can get them to export the data to a snowball for you to get your data.

After reading those pages, I think you're wrong, and the $200 is actually per-device.

For one thing, the documentation says you can use multiple Snowball devices, but carefully tiptoes around saying whether or not there's an extra charge for doing so. All of the language that actually talks about pricing just says "the device", singular. For another thing, the screenshots of the "create a job" workflow are missing any way to specify that you want multiple devices. It sure looks like one job == one device.

(This reminds me of the pricing issues around AWS's Glacier service. It's not even that the pricing model itself is bad -- it's that the marketing is obfuscatory to the point of being arguably deceptive.)

... which is also wildly overpriced.

According to multiple sources, Internet transit in the US now costs less than 1$ for a 1 Mbps line for large deals, which translates to 1$ for 324GB, which translates to 0.003$ / GB.

Amazon charges 15-30 times that.

(it appears that traffic can be much more expensive in places other than the US and presumably Europe)

I think the idea is that if one needs to recall the data from AWS it's due to something like data loss

I found an image here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-...

> This article says it's not e-ink but just a Kindle strapped to the side.

Guess what a Kindle's display is?

Unless i'm mis-judging the scale of this thing, that screen looks a fair bit smaller than a kindle. I think it's just techcrunch using "kindle" as a generic word for e-ink display.

Oh, this label is smart. It knows when to change.

If you had sticky shipping labels, you'd need some intelligence.

I have to admit, while it makes for good storage lock-in, I was impressed that they only charge 3 cents/GB to get the data back out.

Someone else in this thread thought $1500 was expensive to get 50TB back out. If you use this for disaster recovery, you could get all of your data back onsite quickly for a very low (comparative) cost, versus trying to provision high speed connectivity.

There was already a service where you could mail AWS removable hard disks and have them load it into S3 for you.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/

Actually the term was invented long before Internet access was widely available, let alone high speed. It describes transfering data between computers located in the same room (or building) using floppy disks. The alternative was to use some kind of networking, like 10baseT coax ethernet, or one of the many other competing standards, that existed back in the early eighties.

And before the Internet was commonplace, people had to use data lines provisioned by the telephone company to link distant offices, and could also send data that way, as larger companies still do.

Yes.

Yes, you could, the pricing page doesn't mention anything about it though, hence why I wonder.

That's because you pick it up in person and they check / scan your id once you're there.

Maybe it'll be a 10GbE interface?

Presumably they want a little more control over how data is written and stored on the device than they would get with a simple eSATA connected drive.

If they use a simple eSATA drive, they have to worry about formatting, layout, etc., whereas an ethernet connected drive with a bespoke client can hide/control all of that for Amazon.

It also gives them easier options for multi-drive, SSD caching, RAID, etc - things they may or may not use today but could without any impact on the end user.

* Also, it's 10Gb ethernet. And how many desktops do you have laying around that will recognize a 50Tb eSATA drive?

But the end user probably trusts the machine 99%, so what if you load it with something malicious, send it back to Amazon and wait for it to be sent to another customer and thus hack their network? That is if Amazon does not completely wipe their drives (Hide it somehow?).

Tamper detection won't prevent anything. It would just be an indicator that something appears to have happened.

The software load that is wiped every time is a first, and extremely basic, line of defence.

Realistically I'd hope the OS is on a SD card that they can literally take out and throw away after they have the data off (you can pwn the micro-controller on an SD card) - and replace with a freshly baked card.

Yeah, I need to move 20TB in one go - so i can repurpose the disks.

Yes, but "Currently, Snowball doesn't support exporting data."

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/introdu...

Wow. Amazon is really embracing the ship fast, break things, roll with the MVP even when it lacks 50% of the features.

There was also a lot of hassle in ensuring that you included the correct power adapter for each external drive, something that got complicated if you were shipping a lot of different models.

What's interesting is that they don't mention this on the marketing page for snowball. As in "also if you want you can mail your own harddrive, see this page for details". While most would think "why rain on the parade of this new service by mentioning the old service" with Amazon it's more than that. It's this entire idea of weaning people off of legacy ways of doing things (with new names and new processes) so it's harder for any competitor to offer the same type of service, unique way of doing things or handholding. After all anyone can accept (in theory) a mailed in hard drive. Much harder to offer a solution like this with hardware and so on. So to me this is obviously deliberate and consistent with Amazon wanting to raise an entire generation on a new paradigm of getting things done.

Edit: And yes this way it's easier for them as well and removes "missing power supplies" (big deal actually by I get the point..)

I think the poster was talking about someone simply gutting the appliance for the 50TB drives. With a bit of fraud here and there on top.

The way this usually goes is that you pay with a prepaid debit card (that doesn't verify name or address).

Then you get it shipped to a name and address that are not yours, and you intercept the package before it gets there.

It becomes even harder to trace if the name / address / card all match, for instance if you've taken out a credit card on your elderly neighbor's name

They charge $15/day, so I think the idea is that they'll keep charging you this until it's returned. In fact, if you have a need to do a "slow fill", it might make sense to hang onto this device for months at a time before sending them away.

I think the difference in price between what it costs to get it shipped and the market price of the components (even if you just strip out the hard drives) is what makes it fraud-prone.

From my day job, I know this is an issue for mobile operators

then they can't import it.

Yeah, but this is a bit like calling it Amazon Cumswapper. There's no other valid technical use of the word.

They could've called it what most people think it is: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sneakernet

No commonly understood dirty version of that, and I suspect most people would've thought it a very cool name as well as appropriate.