S4 - $12 for 1 year of 1 TB write-only storage | Hacker News Reader

S4 - $12 for 1 year of 1 TB write-only storage

supersimplestorageservice.com

154 pointsulvund67 comments

At the top of the page source:

  <!-- Ahh... I see you're a distingushing Internet user.  You're really a "check under the hood" -->
  <!-- type of guy.  I like that about you.  I also like how you really told off that bully-->
  <!--at the Christmas party... you're such a stud.  And have you lost weight?  You're looking great.-->

and at the bottom:

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Classic.

another gem:

http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/error.html?aspxerro...

i like:

"Please contact us with any questions by e-mailing us at the address below. All complaints and feature requests will be immediately stored using our S4-backed user request database."

They should have an FAQ:

    Q: I can't read my data!
    A: Good!

Next FAQ item:

Q: Do you use any file compression on the storage servers?

A: Yes, we use unix compression program: rm -rf

/dev/null already has built-in compression, capable of infinite compression ratios. It incorporates encryption which is probably equivalent to a One Time Pad.

I see your point. More optimized data flow which could enable them to even use diskless storage servers.

More optimized dataflow would include a router that blackholes packets, or, even better to use the quantum entangled /dev/null scheme outlined below (my licensing terms are reasonable, there is no reason why they shouldn't do that).

How do you english/american guys pronounce FAQ? You spell it by letter like CIA or FBI?

Most people I know say "fack". I am American.

Most people I know say "Eff Aye Queue". I am an American.

Most people I know say "fack". I am in the UK.

Just the FAQs, ma'am

The PayPal links work!

I started reading and I thought this was real. I've built one-way logging systems in the past, where the link to a logging computer was a one-way serial link, with physically no possibility of anything ever going back. This makes sense in network security.

I'm somewhat disappointed that it isn't. I can think of good reasons for a service in which data cannot be erased. If it could only be read on-site but written over the network, it might be advertised using copy similar to this page.

Or you could buy a licence for /dev/null which supports unlimited write-only storage. No internet required.

Someone should patent it!

And it's extremely fast:
$ pv /dev/zero > /dev/null 18.6GB 0:00:05 [3.76GB/s] [ <=> ]

The really amusing thing is that (at least on my machine) it's pv that's the bottleneck there; I have it using 101% cpu, anyhow. pv will give me 9.7GB/s, whereas dd will give me 13.3GB/s (also at 100% cpu). I wonder if anything's faster than dd :)

> pv will give me 9.7GB/s
Wow. What kind of hardware is your /dev/null ? Do you use striping ?

I won't use anything that doesn't have 5-nines uptime guaranteed by an SLA.
Until there's an enterprise-level solution for /dev/null, I think I'm going to have to stick with S4.

At first glance I thought it was some sort of backup solution, where storing was very cheap, but restoring would be the pricey bit. As soon as I reached the Abacuses and 3,5" floppies I definately knew it was a fake :)

Same. I was even thinking: Genius! I almost never need to restore my backups. If I can backup cheaper but still with the peace of mind of knowing that if I do need to restore I just pay an extra fee.
I wonder if there's a real business model there. Most of us restore an extremely small percentage of what we backup. Could you offer a cheaper storage cost than other businesses and make up the difference on the small number of restores that occur?

Not really, all the cost is in storage and redundancy, the process of reading/writing/restoration is relatively negligible unless people are using it for media hosting like Amazon S3.
If you're really that desperate for cheap backups, you'd actually be best off storing terabyte hard drives / SAN boxes around the country, maybe in colo'd buildings.

I'm not at all sure that you're right about that. The dominant cost of keeping data on-line at the moment is the cost of the electricity to run the server and the air conditioning. If the number of drives in active use is a small proportion of the total number of drives then you might be able to achieve real savings by only having active drives actually on-line. There would be a lot of tricky issues (Where and how do you store the inactive drives? How do you swap them back in when needed? How do you insure data integrity for off-line drives?) but if you could solve those I think there might actually be a business there.

I also think you would save costs on customer support. You would have less features after all. Once a drive / tape / whatever is full you take it offline or power it down.
If you can get the entire operation costing less, then it's fine if restores take longer and cost more... because you pass that fee on to the customer. I for one would be happy to pay less for writes and more for reads, since I read backups far less than I write them.
And it's not about being desperate for savings. It's about reducing the overall cost of a commodity... storage.

well, all you are saving vs. disks that are always active is what, 10 or 15 watts per disk? (we are talking low-power disks, I imagine) I mean, a watt-month isn't free, but even at my scale, you are looking at about $0.19 per watt for just power, $0.27 per watt month for power and rack space inclusive. I'm still small enough that I rent racks from other people, so that number is for the watt of power my equipment uses /and/ the watts the cooling system needs to burn to get rid of the waste heat from that watt.)
I wonder if simply using the backblaze type setup with 'green' drives that are set to 'power down' when not in use would be the best solution? In that case, you'd want to minimize writes as much as reads, but it would make some sense to offer a discount for data that 'just sits there'
On the other hand, I bet that when you buy power 'at scale' you can get your watt-month prices quite a bit below $0.27 (note, you must roll in the cost of both the watt your equipment uses /and/ the watts the a/c system uses to deal with the watt of heat. At the low end, the provider bundles those two, but if you build your own data centre, you need to be careful to build that into your cost assumptions.)
The other problem with doing this at the low end is that where I am, I pay full price for a circuit, no matter how much power I pull off it (the circuit just blows if I get too carried away) and even places that do rent you metered power usually have high costs for rackspace that are not metered, so really, you are only potentially saving two or three bucks a month per disk, even if they were idle all month.
Now, also, 'green' disks are usually really slow. 5900rpm rather than 7200rpm. But they are also really cheap, so if your customers want to accept slow, you can save quite a lot on your CapEx. Like probably half, if you use consumer-grade 'green' drives rather than the 'enterprise sata' I use. Using consumer grade drives has a bunch of other problems that your software will need to account for, too... but that's a place where you potentially could have pretty big savings.

>The dominant cost of keeping data on-line at the moment is the cost of the electricity to run the server and the air conditioning.
That fell under "storage and redundancy".
Storage = the hardware and electricity required to store/minimally serve the data
redundancy = number of places the data is stored
thusly
cost = storage cost * redundancy
I really hate having to verbosely explain things like this. Is it even remotely possible for you to give me the benefit of the doubt and not assume I'm a blithering moron when I don't expound ad nauseam every little detail of what I'm describing?

There's definitely a business model, but it's short lived: you have to skip the country before the first person tries to restore his data and realizes you were throwing it all away to begin with. :)

I bet they use multiple /dev/null devices in RAID.

Their performance must be insane.

In a way this is a variation on a very old theme, here is the original:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360704

For all we know, they've got custom hardware which uses that chip! Maybe that's how they get such fast write speeds.

Let's hope they don't pull the chips out too frequently then (check the graphs).

They check in, but they never ever check out.

It's the Hotel California of online storage.

"Key Scenarios - Customer complaint database"
Hilarious. I know lots of companies that must use this service.

Funny stuff! Looks like a response to Amazon's new offering:
"We are pleased to introduce a new storage option for Amazon S3 called Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) that enables customers to reduce their costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than the standard storage of Amazon S3."
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/05/19/announc...

Hm. April 1st was a while ago. If you consider buying, hit me up, I'll beat their prices whatever they ask for.

Can you offer a transactional API?

Hehe, tricky guy :)
Well, let's say that as long as we're talking about files and there is enough local free space I might be able to do that.
But once committed that's it, no rollback past that point.
Or I'd have to charge significantly more.
We'll take this on a case-by-case basis.

Hmm, must be using a very optimistic locking strategy.

Actually, not too useless for testing your outgoing bandwidth/latency.

Surprised that the paypal link is real.

Why? It's the perfect product :)

If you can never get your data back out, how is it useful?!

Well, if I think about all the files on my harddrive, I hardly read any of them on a given day anyway. If I work that out over the longer term there must be plenty of files that I'll never read again, but still keep lugging around with me.
I could store those in S4, free up some space and re-use it for other files.

I just paid for 1TB (really) :)

probably to pay for that upload-only bandwidth.

That's why I can beat their price, my api will have superior transfer speeds too. I will use my patented quantum-entangled /dev/null transport layer.

I think my approach is better, no matter how big a file you want to store I only have to store the same amount of data... all I do is hash it first.
Still working on the restore side of things, but that can't be too difficult, can it?

It's easy actually, the following code snippet will restore any file as long as you still have the hash:
bignum i; for (i=0;i<MAXBIGNUM;i++) { if (hash(i) == filehash) { break; } } fprintf("%Bd",i);

Thanks for the JavaScript!

I really hope you're not serious, but on the off-chance that you are, bignum is not exactly a javascript data type and fprintf isn't a standard javascript function either.
It was more of a pseudo code joke.
If you weren't serious, congratulations ;)

What, you mean hashes don't won't like compression?

Sure they do ;)

They have a money back guarantee. E.g. in case you manage to read your data back.

Great interview filter if you ask me.

Better filter for recruiters if you unfortunately have to deal with them. Tell the recruiter you're looking for an applicant with S4 experience and see if you get any resumes back with it. If so, you know the recruiter is altering the resumes.

Ask for 5 years experience, until 2015. Then ask for 10.

Naive question: How do you recover the write-only data?

You just need to reverse the polarity.

Actually, it's a bit more complex than that. You would have to reverse the direction the read device travels through time and then read the write device when they intercept. Reversing the direction multiple times can make multiple reads at different states of the write device.
Sounds feasible, if you have enough strange matter lying around.

this is awesome! i now have a GOOD cloud storage candidate for backups of my blu-ray movies that doesn't cost more than the cost of a new blu-ray disc.

LOLROTF

MotherInLawPhotos.com - great case study. ;o)

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