[guelo]

His MicroSD card calculations are off because it would take a month to insert an airplane-load of those cards one by one into some computer to copy them into your storage.

Which also makes me wonder why this Snowball device only does Ethernet. Seems like it should have an eSATA port.

[djrogers]

Presumably they want a little more control over how data is written and stored on the device than they would get with a simple eSATA connected drive.

If they use a simple eSATA drive, they have to worry about formatting, layout, etc., whereas an ethernet connected drive with a bespoke client can hide/control all of that for Amazon.

It also gives them easier options for multi-drive, SSD caching, RAID, etc - things they may or may not use today but could without any impact on the end user.

* Also, it's 10Gb ethernet. And how many desktops do you have laying around that will recognize a 50Tb eSATA drive?

[scott_karana]

Maybe it'll be a 10GbE interface?

[toomuchtodo]

Ethernet is most ubiquitous. You don't need physical access to a server with data, just network access. Most environments outside of datacenters don't have 10GbE switches or NICs yet.

EDIT: It appears it supports 10GbE natively. I assume it'll also support lower Ethernet speeds.

[scott_karana]

> I assume it'll also support lower Ethernet speeds.

Yeah, ethernet has pretty much always downgraded well. That's why a 10GBASE-T interface is perfect :P

(I should have been more clear with my initialisms)