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Comment by utrex | Hacker News Reader

teraflop was right, it's $200 per snowball device job, which is currently limited to 50TB. Maybe that will change. You can order multiple jobs to import more data. You have 10 days to complete the transfer and ship it back and then it's $15 a day. $200 buys you 50TB per job, great encryption, and speedy migration. Sources: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t... and https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/pricing/

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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.)

You can request multiple devices at once. I didn't include that screen in the blog post.

Ah, good to know! I would edit my comment with a correction if the option was still available.

You are right. I think that the value add is that in addition to getting to use 50TB of storage you also get good encryption and usable software.

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