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Comment by chris_mahan | Hacker News Reader

per month? That's $120/year, or $360 for 3 years.

I think you can buy a couple of 3 TB hard drives for that.

Reminds me of the infamous "Show HN: Dropbox" post. One of the top comments:

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Since then it's gotten even easier. Just buy a couple of NAS drives (or a couple of Raspberry Pi with external hard drives), setup OwnCloud, that's it (note have recommended doubling the hardware used to ensure multiple backups).

I use Dropbox but I used the AdWords trick to give myself 20GB space on the free account, which is ample for me. If I thought I would need one of the pricier options I'd see very little reason not to spend about an hour of my time to build an OwnCloud solution. Oh and it has support for iOS/Android for those that are interested... https://owncloud.com/products/mobileapps

They're providing power, redundancy, and network connectivity.

And backups/replication/off-site storage, security, maintenance, etc.

So why don't they say that? Instead it's: 9.99 per month for 1TB.

Because if they did, we'd be bitching about how Google has too much marketing-speak on their copy about Drive, and how it's not that innovative since other remote storage companies do the same.

It's implied.

We all know(or should know) that GDrive is provided to us with a huge & complex infrastructure. Your TB drives at home do not begin to compare.

Does it? Does the average user know this?

I think the average user would get very confused by all those words whereas if you say online back up he will instantly get how it is useful for him.

and spying for free

I'd say it's included with the $10 actually.

The guy is right; calculate it through. I did with consumer priced hardware (they can probably get it at near manufacturing costs because of the huge volume) and they still seem to be making a fair bit of profit.

That's not a fair comparison.

This is still not practical for my use. It is a bit like Lease vs Buy for automobiles IMO.

I recently bought 2x2tb drives for $75 each and a 2 bay Synology NAS for $150. Now I have redundancy (mirroring), online access, much faster access to my data, faster backups, And it was dead simple to setup and configure (web based configuration tool, and tool-less hardware).

Best of all the data is not subject to surveillance and pilfering.

It will take around 15 months before I will break even for my investment (vs Google drive prices), but I believe that it was worth the small amount of extra time spent and the up front spending.

Thoughts anyone?

Seems pretty awesome. Couple of questions? - DS214se model? - Are the disks encrypted? - Can you remotely upload files over https over some API?

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