Personal Cloud Storage seems ripe for disruption
Virtually all online storage vendors have settled on about 10 bucks per TB per month, and those figures are substantially cheaper than AWS (20/TB-month generally AND high transfer costs)
Meanwhile, hard drives are now down to $8 per terabyte as of this post in retail channels, where multiple 10TB drives can be bought for $80.
Yes I understand that there are:
- server costs (which are constantly dropping)
- electricity costs (generally dropping as cheaper gas turbine and wind/solar come online)
- backups/redundancy (ok... 2x the hardware cost)
- transfer costs (which are virtually free for large DCs)
But paying more for storage per month than it costs for buying the actual physical capacity? We are not talking "enterprise grade" or "storage network" needs that would necessitate SSD storage.
Is this simply large scale profit taking? Are there massive hidden costs in storage farms I am unaware of? I simply cannot imagine a Hetzner-style company could not offer dirt cheap consumer storage on the order of 20$/year/TB or even cheaper, say 20$ per TB-year for the first year and then 10$ per TB-year after that.