<story><title>Super Simple Storage Service</title><url>http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>azornathogron</author><text>I believe they have overestimated the cost of using 3.5&amp;quot; floppies, probably to make themselves look better by comparison.&lt;p&gt;They give the cost as $211,172, but that&amp;#x27;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 &amp;quot;floppy disk lifetime&amp;quot; and the internet [1] told me &amp;quot;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.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.storagecraft.com&amp;#x2F;data-storage-lifespan&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.storagecraft.com&amp;#x2F;data-storage-lifespan&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jiggawatts</author><text>This suddenly reminded me of the floppy-disk raid: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20080117032102&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;phoenix.cc.edu:80&amp;#x2F;MegaFloppy.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20080117032102&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;phoenix.cc...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Can you imagine the &lt;i&gt;noise&lt;/i&gt;? It would be... glorious.&lt;p&gt;The linked article used these compact drives: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;External-Floppy-1-44MB-FDUSB-M-V1&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;B00U5Z8A48&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;External-Floppy-1-44MB-FDUSB-M-V1&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s see... that&amp;#x27;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. &lt;i&gt;Not too shabby!&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;A decent sized data centre might have 1,000 racks. So a &amp;quot;cloud-scale&amp;quot; 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&amp;#x27;re back to 840 GB of usable storage capacity per floor, but with an impressive 7M IOPS.&lt;p&gt;To put things in perspective, that&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Super Simple Storage Service</title><url>http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>azornathogron</author><text>I believe they have overestimated the cost of using 3.5&amp;quot; floppies, probably to make themselves look better by comparison.&lt;p&gt;They give the cost as $211,172, but that&amp;#x27;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 &amp;quot;floppy disk lifetime&amp;quot; and the internet [1] told me &amp;quot;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.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.storagecraft.com&amp;#x2F;data-storage-lifespan&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.storagecraft.com&amp;#x2F;data-storage-lifespan&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nition</author><text>Since this is a write-only service, it doesn&amp;#x27;t actually matter if the disk stops working, or even ceases to exist. Therefore we may be able to estimate the lifespan as infinite.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>