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Comment by SkipperCat | Hacker News Reader

Fun anecdote... Many years ago, we had to send a large dataset from the east coast to the west coast. I think we had a 10 or 100Mbps WAN connection (this was the 90s). It was faster to freight airship the entire storage device than send it over the wire (which we did).

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The amazing thing is that, at current drive and major cloud egress pricing, it is still cheaper to buy, ship, and throw away a disk than to send data over the network.

AWS charges 5 cents/GB at the highest tier. That’s $50/TiB (roughly). 18 TiB out from AWS costs $900. You can buy a nice WD Red Pro 18 TiB drive from Amazon for $298, and shipping it next day is not particularly expensive.

Of course, you can’t load data onto that drive from AWS, and you won’t pay anywhere near $900 to send 18 TiB over a network from any reasonable provider.

I think AWS has a similar service where they send a van to your private datacenter that has a bunch of storage servers in it to help you migrate to S3. You plug the van in the network and start uploading.

If the need is there, AWS will park a 45' long shipping container outside your place that can hold up to 100PB.

https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

Or you can get a Snowball that holds 80TB. These you just ship via UPS.

It's still the case! Upload speeds (especially on consumer-grade Internet connections) haven't kept pace, and AWS will send you box for you to copy your data into that you mail back to them. If you have a lot of data, they'll send you a shipping container!

https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/

Around the year 2001 my employer at the time was doing a Exchange mailbox migration from a datacenter in Connecticut to one in Atlanta. They paid for me to fly up there (coach fare), pick up the data on an external USB drive, fly back with the drive in my carry-on luggage, drive to the data center and plug it in.

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