[extra88]

With Snowball, you don't need a huge pipe because your data is being sneaker-netted to one of their data centers. You don't need a ton of storage disks because they're lending Snowball to you in the short-term as a means of copying your data to S3 (and/or Glacier) for the long-term.

If you can spare a 1 gigabit connection to saturate with S3 uploads, you can send 50TB in about two weeks. It takes about a week to request a Snowball, have it arrive, you fill it (takes about a day, assuming you have a 10Gbit connection for Snowball), you ship it back, they copy the contents to AWS storage. If you don't have a spare 1 gigabit connection, the speed is that much better. Even if you don't have 10Gbit hardware to fill Snowball with, a local, dedicated 1 gigabit connection to Snowball would be much more reliable.

[mabbo]

Does it seriously take a week to get a snowball? You'd think with all the logistics Amazon owns...

[extra88]

A week to go from requesting a Snowball to having your data in the cloud. For example, place the request Monday morning, receive it Wednesday afternoon, immediately get started filling it, ship it back Thursday afternoon, they receive it on Saturday, hook it up, your data is in your AWS storage by the end of the day Sunday.

[chrisseaton]

I think they meant a week to request it, receive it, fill it, send it back, upload it to S3.