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Comment by rlpb | Hacker News Reader

I claim that people who have the speed of your home connection is not the target market. You may want one of these, but this kind of demand will not be enough to support the existence of this product.

Businesses have a choice: they can invest in buying storage hardware for a bunch of their computers every few years, or they can invest in a fast-enough Internet connection and outsource the storage. That Internet connection will bring them additional benefits over just storage.

I claim that the economics are switching in favor of the Internet option, and will continue to do so over the next decade.

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The problem is that businesses don't always have a choice. Maybe big corporations do, but for small companies, you have to deal with that the locals ISPs give you. Where I live (Italy), unless you happen to live in a major city (and even there, the coverage is small and the best speed you can get is 10mb/s) the best you can get is a SHDSL line, which gives you at most 8mb/s for about 300-400€/month. And that's if you're lucky to have a central nearby that supports it, otherwise ADSL2+ it is (1mb/s). I'm sure this is the situation in most of the world.

There's is also the "political" problem (as outlined by everyone else), I can't see every company wanting to outsource the storage of their secret data. Then you're also at the mercy of Amazon, that for whatever reason can stop providing you service (It's a tiny possibility, but it's still there).

For the "Archive Disc" to be viable, it needs to still be viable several years from now. Despite areas with poor connectivity, connection bandwidth will only ever go up (and prices down), and it does so very quickly.

> I claim that people who have the speed of your home connection is not the target market.

You know that you are talking about the typical speed of many industrialized countries, like Germany, Spain, France? I doubt those whole countries are not the target market.

The economics maybe, but the political will is another story. The business that I work for will not even contemplate cloud based anything.

We use expensive 500gb tapes to take weekly backups of our entire site which are kept for 1 year. I'm not sure how many times the tapes can be overwritten but there would be a price-point for these archive disks that would make the tapes obsolete. It would also save a lot of space and therefore money as we are charged to store the bulky tapes off site.

I know plenty of relatively small businesses in my area that use business-class asymmetric DSL connections with an upload speed that tops out under 40KiB/s. Many of these businesses are not in an area laid with fiber-optic cable. I have no idea how much it would cost to get dedicated fiber to a business in an area where it hasn't been pre-laid, but I imagine a nontrivial sum.

Small businesses still generate data that needs to be archived. Uploading a TiB of data at ~40KiB/s would take the best part of a year.

Uh, he pointed out the average. For some of us first world countries where the average is even less it's even harder. That also fails to consider places that have quota limits as well as low-bandwidth connections, for example whereby I get 150GB/month combined down & up.

We have a company that employs 120 people. The fastest connection that we can get is 4Mbps down/1Mbps up.

The economics are certainly moving, but I think it will be a long time before on-site storage is obsolete.

A reliable fast connection is still very expensive, and there are several other considerations. When we looked at offsite backup a major consideration was restore times. Even if you can do differential backups, in a disaster you might need to get everything back ASAP and even the best internet connection can't get near the throughput of onsite disks/tapes.

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