Super Simple Storage Service | Hacker News Reader

Super Simple Storage Service

supersimplestorageservice.com

466 pointsjamespwilliams155 comments

I believe they have overestimated the cost of using 3.5" floppies, probably to make themselves look better by comparison.

They give the cost as $211,172, but that's the cost to buy a 1 TiB pack of floppies. Their own storage cost is per-month, so to get the equivalent cost for floppies you need to also divide by the expected useful lifetime of a floppy disk. I did a web search for "floppy disk lifetime" and the internet [1] told me "I’ve seen numbers saying the lifespan of floppy disks is three to five years. But I’ve also seen numbers that claim they can last ten to twenty years or even indefinitely."

If you assume floppy disks have an expected lifetime of 5 years, you can amortise the cost across that time, bringing the cost per TiB-month down to a nice reasonable $3,520.

[1] https://blog.storagecraft.com/data-storage-lifespan/

Their calculations for S3 is wrong too. If you use glacial deep archive storing a terabyte costs $0.99 per month.

Since we have multiple points of data for lifespan, perhaps we should be computing a weighted average between them?

Going by gut feel: 3-5 years sounds like "pretty likely", let's give that 95% of the weight, at 4 years for simplicity. 10-20 years would be nice, but really, how much tech lasts that long? Not much. How about 4.9999999% at 15 years. And the remaining can go to "indefinitely", which seems pretty darn unlikely, so it has 0.0000001% weight.

(4*95+15*4.9999999+∞*0.0000001 / 100) = ∞

I guess we can ignore the monthly cost ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I applied weights to things, so this is Bayesian, and we all know that's always right.

You didn't take into account the heat death of the universe.

It won't be all that hot, so I don't really think the floppies are in any risk of melting because of it. Probably nothing to worry about.

It is the lack of heat that would be the issue.

Just roll them in a nice soft blanket. I have one that keeps me warm even in plain winter. We can add a hot chocolate cup and that should do the trick.

To be fair, less entropy means those floppies will last longer - so the heat death should marginally raise the their expected lifetime.

What's more, floppies are actually prior art for their business model. At least my AMIGA days were just endless problems with broken floppies.

i believe there is an opportunity in the market for an advanced data storage technology to support writing huge volumes of information to a single 3.5" floppy, provided the legacy constraint of offering a read operation can be dispensed with.

Easy! Once you've written to the end just seek back to sector zero and continue writing. It's a like data-layer-cake.

So do they actually provide the newest hottest proof-of-writing even? Otherwise they’re just plain scam!

Given my own experience with 3.5" floppies in the past often yielded lifetimes in single digit months, I would say any estimate of years needs to have a very large error margin, and you need to use RAIF.

My experience is very similar, but I can believe that write-only or even single-read scenario could extend the expected lifetime to said years.

If I recall correctly the read/write head of a floppy drive rested directly on the media. This meant the disks wore out faster the more you used them.

Assuming a write-only interface, I think I could push the cost of writing 1TB of data to a floppy disk down to the cost of a single disk.

Plus, when you’re done writing your data, you’ll have a fancy drink coaster!

Since this is a write-only service, it doesn't actually matter if the disk stops working, or even ceases to exist. Therefore we may be able to estimate the lifespan as infinite.

There may also be no need to purchase more than one disk. In fact taken to its logical conclusion there is no need to purchase any disk at all - but of course that brings us all the way to the S4 business model itself.

I don't think comparing a service like S4 to a non-existing disk is fair. Especially in enterprise software, I often get the requirement that the data is reliably written. I can easily point an auditor to the S4 service contract and SLAs to prove we fulfill this. A bespoke arrangement of floppy drives and shredders might pass if the auditor's having a good day. But removing the disks entirely? That will never fly.

This suddenly reminded me of the floppy-disk raid: https://web.archive.org/web/20080117032102/http://phoenix.cc...

You've got to wonder how it would work if taken to the extreme: rack after rack of floppy drives filling an entire data centre providing a glacially-slow S3 service.

Can you imagine the noise? It would be... glorious.

The linked article used these compact drives: https://www.amazon.com/External-Floppy-1-44MB-FDUSB-M-V1/dp/...

They're 5.75 x 4.25 x 0.75 inches. So if you mount them vertically like in high-density storage arrays, you can fit 25 of them into the width of a rack, about 7 rows from the front to back. So... about 175 per layer that is about 4 RU high including the space for the controller board. You can fit 10 of these layers in a standard rack, for 1,750 floppy drives total per rack.

Let's see... that's 2.52 GB per rack! Seek times are variable depending on the floppy drive model, but 250 ms is approximately correct for the average. So about 7,000 IOPS total per rack. Not too shabby!

A decent sized data centre might have 1,000 racks. So a "cloud-scale" floppy drive object storage system might have 2.52 TB of raw storage. However, you have to divide that by three for the redundant copies, so we're back to 840 GB of usable storage capacity per floor, but with an impressive 7M IOPS.

To put things in perspective, that's directly equivalent to a single modern laptop SSD drive in terms of both capacity and IOPS. Except that the latency of the SSD is 5000x lower.

You can even make music with the sounds. On youtube there are various people doing this, like Paweł with his Floppotron.

https://youtu.be/G-X-p0C0Uas

And pretty easy at that, just just put a PWM signal on the stepper pins (watch the voltage and current though, easily fries and MCU) and there you go

Why use a Floppy Disk comparison at all. I guess its for comic value.

But a 1 TB HDD and an associated Linux system would probably cost about 300 USD.

Assuming a lifespan of about 7 years, monthly cost comes to about 3 USD per month.

But at 25kbps sustained write (inc optimistic disk juggling) it'd take 463 days to write 1TB. If that's your comparison number, you'd need to factor in 17 drives running in parallel to write 1tb in February. And a robot, or 6 people to handle disks. And 14m³ archive space.

And double all that if you want redundancy.

But the abacus beads could store rotational data. There's at least 8 bits of data there, more if you can put some time in. That's free real estate there.

LS240 drives can superformat HD floppies to 32MB. Lots more potential savings to be had there.

I think they've underestimated it. Hard to visualise 700,000 floppy disks but I have a feeling stored at home it would cost me 1 marriage.

A really nice touch is the case study they use, which shows a nonexistent MothersInLawPhotos . com (http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/MotherInLawPhotos.p...) with all the images broken

If you look closely, you’ll see it’s not actually a page at all, but a screenshot of a page… with all the images broken. Top marks for the jokes within jokes and whoever put this all together. It’s definitely given me a really good chuckle tonight!

Lets see who’ll have the last laugh! (Full disclosure: an early backer of S4)

So this is not a joke?

Can’t you back a joke? ;)

Got me. :)

If you click buy now, you get a "this resource can't be read" error.

"If you reached this page by clicking a link, try unclicking the link."

does it make the standard clunk clunk noises too?

I don't know why I would purchase this service, it looks like it could be easily replicated using a bunch of shell scripts...

Can you provide ∞ nines of reliability?

You mean just like Dropbox is no real business because it’s just a bunch of shell scripts?

you mean like dropbox?

Every joke falls dead in this place.

> could be easily replicated using a bunch of shell scripts

Well, I see the Dropbox joke here but the service in question is most faithfully replicated with the '> /dev/null' command. Nothing to purchase here.

https://devnull-as-a-service.com/

"One Less to Go" on the code page.

The API does not provide any means for deleting the uploaded data. Also, there is no durability guarantee. This service looks like a scam.

oh wow really?

> S4's state-of-the-art write-only interface removes the headaches commonly associated with reading data.

Durability is one of the headaches you can ignore with a write only interface.

It doesn't even use a blockchain, how can we trust it?

Blockchain would fit perfectly, since it is a write only technology. And you do get nice features at no cost like smart contract, NFTs...

Umm. The blockchain is WORM technology (kinda). You write once, but it can be ready by anyone.

This is a write-only resource…

Now, you could in theory store SHA hashes on a block chain to confirm that the files were written.

You didn’t download the WSDL

How do you figure? Looks pretty legit. Their storage imagery is a picture of multiple save icons... I mean, what else could they do to show how well they can store data?

Try checking the "buy" URL.

They could be storing to /dev/null. That's a very safe target, nobody can steal our data. Unfortunately it's technically not encrypted at rest.

You can always encrypt it before piping it to /dev/null.

A v2 feature might be e2e encryption, seems like that should be feasible

I know this is a joke, but I have to wonder if this service could satisfy some compliance check box somewhere.

No HTTPS is a big one

Their API has response messages (!). So much for a write-only service. Not quite as secure as advertised. I'm disappointed.

Do the response messages have anything to do with the ability to read the data? It seems normal for an API to report back common data like status message, number of bytes written, etc. It doesn't mean anything about reading the data itself

> If you reached this page by clicking a link, try unclicking the link.

Built on mangodb?

https://github.com/dcramer/mangodb

I think there are an almost infinite number of technologies that this could be based on.

I wouldn’t rally call /dev/null a “technology “ per se.

Why not? I got a patent on it. A method and system for representing a write-only data store.

> Imagine the convenience of enabling your customers to open help tickets, provide feedback, add feature requests directly to your shared, read-proof store.

Reliably deployed in production for many years at all Fortune 500s!

Lol. This is hilarious. I haven't laughed this much for ages, this had me laughing like the whole time I was reading it. Abacii and the scale transition in the graph y axis... Hahaha

Tho seriously the lack of a an IaC option means that's a hard no from me. If I can't self-host this on an on-promise open source deployment, they're just making money of people too lazy to set this up themselves with rsync and bash scripts.

I loved the error message:

The resource cannot be read

The resource you are trying to access cannot be read, due to the following reason:

No read operation available.

I was convinced that I was looking at a legitimate error message from IIS until I read it.

"Consuming S4 is a snap with advanced integration options. Upload directly from our website, send an email, tweet your content, or simply yell in an empty room."

Lol... yell in an empty room.

For other readers this seems to be a joke.

I was going to comment "Why would a joke have a PayPal link to subscribe?"

...and then I clicked on the PayPal link :)

The link itself is great too: /s4/is/a/joke/stop/sending/us/money/readthefineprint.aspx

Thank you. I did find it odd they compared their service to floppy disks and abacuses.

It absolutely is a joke for readers. It's write-only technology! ;)

If you're looking for a bridge though, boy do I have an offer for you.

The internet needs more of this. Bring back bonsai kittens!

That is, 90s style hoax websites

Lots of opportunities for a write only storage service

> Key Scenarios: Customer complaint database Covert government document storage SETI@home output recorder Personal diary entries Unpublished manuscripts

> Case Studies MotherInLawPhotos.com

It had me up until the SOAP example!

Lol same

I'm about to start S5 - update only DB. Even less headache to manage and pricing is as low as $1/PB

Wanna help me start S6? A Delete-Only mass-storage system.

Jokes aside, I wiki'd this and there are a few interesting aspects of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-only_memory_(engineering...

It is all hosted in S3 when you click to buy it takes you here

http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/payments/submit/s4/...

Which is actually a custom 403 page made to look like an old IIS error page. if you put in any url on the domain where the file does not exist you get the same error eg

http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/blah

Fun to see that is was released at least 13 years ago, and the joke still works

If I recall, this was announced at a Meetup event. Halfway through, amidst the giggles, there was an awkward moment when the hosts realized some of the audience thought it was a real service.

1. "S4's state-of-the-art write-only interface removes the headaches commonly associated with reading data."

2. Click the buy buttons and then read carefully.

Super Simple Storage Service, huh.

Opinion: This was posted ~10 days late.

Evaluating this for a client, I’m unclear on how this works with PHI under HIPAA, do I still need a BAA?

This comment started as a joke and now I’m genuinely thinking about it; also from the disk usage claims which make it clear they’re not storing the data, would a service like require a BAA? It’d have to be encrypted at rest, so assuming that was true, and assuming that the data actually got stored (presumably as cold storage) I’m thinking it’d still require BAAs…

It's kind of Schrodinger's PHI. By the time you check to see if it exists, it definitely both does and does not but not provably so either way so... there, then.

Just upload everything to /dev/null on your server, unlimited write only storage. Save millions with this one neat trick, AWS salesmen hate it.

Perfect for write-only code.

To stay with the "write-only" nature of this, they need to publish a GitHub for their perl sample code...

What a delightful bit of whimsy.

SQL on Rails

https://youtu.be/0_PK1eDQyVg

Always cracks me up, never gets old.

Finally WOM-as-a-service.

http://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/cool-products/images/signet...

This is right up there with “gifs with sound” for me.

Reminds of C14, which stores data in a nuclear fallout shelter, and takes a few minutes to retrieve. https://www.scaleway.com/en/c14-cold-storage/

It's a scam, obviously. Just look a the site, it's from late 90', no certificate.

I think it is more of a joke. You can use /dev/null for unlimited free write only storage

It's even funnier when you realize it's hosted on an AWS S3 Bucket ~(^-^)~

When the heck is R2 hitting general availability? In my mind it's on the verge of becoming vaporware. Although, it did have the nice side effect of increasing the amount of free egress from S3.

I would gladly pay for this, just for the dose of endorphin it delivered tonight

I've been so traumatized by WSDL it brings up bad memories even in jokes.

Hover over the servers image and you can see their underlying file system.

THIS IS GOLD!, I love it, I event click the paypal link to see if you have some old school fake paypal payment gateway.

By the way the upload example form is broken, making it actually work would be awesome

This seems like a great service for the storages backend of an applicant tracking system!

Given that 98% of resumes don't need to be read, this seems like a sane default.

Something about this being HTTP only makes it even better.

This reminds me of the intelligence services certified for top secret information version of a FIFO queue: the FINO queue. N of course stands for …

I clicked the Buy Now button. Good thing it didn't work, because a part of me was thinking about actually making a payment.

Confused for a second till I saw "Write-Only storage".

Obviously, they should include "Trash bin" in the pricing comparison table.

Hover over the image under the "S4:" header :)

/dev/null as a service? Webscale!

/dev/null may be unavailable, for example in lightweight chroot/containers without /dev. It requires extra effort and administration from our devops team. Furthermore, it's a hard-coded path and this is a well-known code smell. It's better to outsource it to a dedicated team with /dev/null expertise rather than re-inventing the wheel in-house.

Is a hardcoded domain even better?

If you don't have access to /dev/null, then of course your security policy will give access to the internet. so, yes

To save on the ingress charges I use 0.0.0.0

If you click the PayPal button you will find the description of the perfect procedure to unclick links.

Fact check: The cost of S3 standard storage per TB is approximately $23 not $153. S3 standard storage, the most expensive kind, is $.021-.023 per GB.

S4 costs about the same as S3 Deep Archive storage.

Update: The article appears to be a joke. That aside, there are no cost savings against S3 Deep Archive; additionally S3 Deep Archive supports restores unlike the write-only S4.

> S3 Deep Archive supports restores unlike the write-only S4

I bet that a Super service like this may also support restores, but because of security reasons, they would only be internally and not be visible to the end user.

The site's domain was registered in 2009, and I guess it hasn't been updated since then. Their 1TB S3 price is in line with S3's 2008 price of $0.15/GB, and many (all?) of S3's advanced pricing tiers wouldn't have debuted yet.

Appears to be a joke? LOL

He’s not wrong.

Reminds of the Mitch Hedberg joke “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.”: “It appears to be a joke. It actually is a joke, but appears to be one too.”

My seven year old would say: O...M...G.

If it is write-only, what is the point. what is the cost of reading, what was written?

It's a joke

Old stuff: https://web.archive.org/web/20160219044114/https://dl.dropbo...

I tried to access this but I got a 418 error. I don’t even own a teapot.

please attach a bearer token with a signed attestation that you don't own a teapot, and re-submit your request

I genuinely believe I could actually use this service.

There might actually be a market for the web/cloud equivanent of /dev/null. So long as the API actually works, it would be nice to prototype against.

lol wut? i like the name.

my s4: https://github.com/nathants/s4

Ha! There was also Apache S4 - a distributed stream processing framework from Yahoo! But it was retired before leaving the incubator a very long time ago.

Wait. Wasn't April 1st a week or so ago?

You're allowed to have a chuckle any day of the year.

Buy now with PayPal button does not work.

I sent them a complaint. And according to the page the complaints are prime example of S4 usage.

Contact is write only too?

Great for most backups.

cat myfile.txt > /dev/null Is a way cheaper :)

This doesn’t seem to be compatible with GDPR’s Right of Access.

Another example of an overpriced cloud service when a faster and cheaper solution is right in your CLI in the form of /dev/null which provides an equivalent service without the network latency and the bills!

You sound like the Dropbox guy. Sure for someone with experience like you it may be simple to set this up and maybe even faster, but some of us want to focus on our core product and not worry about this sort of thing. Knowing there's a provider I can call when something goes wrong with file uploads can be a big peace of mind.

/dev/null is quite webscale as well, writing to it is as fast as heck!

Super Simple (but not reliable) Storage Service

There is a reason why storage is hard and why I only trust big techs to do it

Why comment if you don’t even open the link?

Heh. Reminds me of:

It's hard to remember now, but there was a period of time not long ago when "the cloud" hadn't yet become an overused catchphrase. In those heady days of yore, people used to store things themselves – usually only on one device, and uphill both ways. These were hardscrabble people, living off of whatever meager storage they could scrounge together. They’d zip things, put them on zip drives, and hope for the best. Then one day almost everyone looked up towards the metaphorical sky and made a lot of compromises.

https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/

This is pretty sketchy. No HTTPS and a fake example website called MothersInLawPhotos

Whoosh.

While it's not HTTPS it does at least appear to be monetized.

Blazingly fast: No SSL handshakes!

I hope not. You should be using TLS by now.

I'm guessing this is a competitor to S3 Glacier Deep Archive since you aren't meant to read from it. They don't seem to provide information on how you get your data out. Maybe they will mail your drives with your data?

Nah, that's why they're so cheap even compared to the competition. There is no read option. There's effectively no cost because there's no retrieval infrastructure!

(In case you completely missed it, this site is satire, similar to /dev/null-as-a-service, etc)

Maybe someone should to an Ask HN: what happens when you request your S3 glacier data. I use it, but frankly it seems more like a protection racket given the costs of getting anything out of there.

Test your backups.

Read time for me has been measured in minutes or sub hour, but the data isn’t huge.

I keep those glacier'd files on tape as well.

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