[gmiller123456]

I don't get what's going on with on-line storage. You can walk in Best Buy and get a few Tb hard drive for well under $100. Yet every cloud service wants to charge you several times that per year for just 1Tb. I understand drives fail, there's operating cost, and some need extremely low latency. But there seems to be a huge disparity between what a hard drive costs, and what it costs to make it available on the Internet.

[tekknik]

There’s a difference between a consumer drive and a server drive. Plop that $100 drive in and you may be back in a week or so replacing it.

[gmiller123456]

Why would you think a drive automatically looses lifespan just because the computer it's in is referred to as a server? Many of my desktop hard drives see more activity that some of my website HDs.

[tekknik]

Because a server has more traffic than a consumer machine. You’re mistaken if you think your home server has the same traffic as an S3 storage node.

Read more about the differences in drives here: https://blog.storagecraft.com/consumer-vs-enterprise-hard-dr...

[gmiller123456]

Again, you're making assumptions about how busy a server has to be. I have websites that don't get 10 visitors a day.

[mritzmann]

And your website, with 10 visits per day, needs several TB of data?

[gmiller123456]

Need? No. Could use reasonably priced storage? Yes. I think you've lost track of the point I was trying to make.