[kjkjadksj]

I can’t get over the fact how storage is still so expensive in 2024. Lowest you can get is probably $5 per tb a month from any of these companies. A new tb hdd is probably $25 today. Where does the money go, into c suite car payments?

[RantyDave]

Backblaze have written many blog posts on how they go from a few thousand hard drives to a business. For me, the most interesting part was they went from six generations of self designed storage pods to "fuck it, just buy Dell". Long story short: these businesses are surprisingly complicated.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/next-backblaze-storage-pod/

[sophacles]

You're comparing apples and oranges here....

A $25/TB drive is not the only expense that $5 goes towards:

* there's actually probably 2 or more HDs holding that TB, since the business is promising that the data won't be lost

* theres the computer(s) that hold that HD.

* theres the electicity, bandwidth and space rental costs for those computers

* theres the cost of employees to make sure that the computers keep running.

* theres the cost of the marketing so that you know that the service is available

* theres all the book-keeping, taxes, cc fees, etc that need to be paid on the recurring charge

* there's (hopefully) profit for the investors/owners

and so on.

Also, on your side you should consider several of those factors yourself to do the comparrison:

* how much do you consider the time spent managing your hdds to be worth? (if you're a business this is employee-hrs, if you're talking about for yourself privately, there's still a value you should attach to your own time)

* do you have backups? If so, what does it cost to put them offsite? (In terms of space rental or favors traded, and your time)

* electricity, etc

* how much is it going to cost you to learn to reliably store your data (in terms of up-front cost, time spent, etc)

* and of course hard drive costs

[kjkjadksj]

I am aware they are hosted on servers with mirrors or parity drives. It still makes no sense how these services seem to raise prices over time instead of seeing the savings from depreciating storage and hardware costs passed to the consumer, unless you realize they are squeezing you.

[godelski]

I really believe there's a missing market. I think there would be big business in building servers for homes. Where you prioritize low power usage and low noise, and do not need blazing speeds or frequent/high access. Cloud is great, but some things should still be stored at home. Home NAS systems are a bit odd and difficult to expand (nowhere near what a rack is).

My argument would be that this would be helpful with the high adaptation of things like Ring doorbells and other camera systems at home. Where people can store their own data and provides better security & privacy given you need not rely on a data connection to store that footage. It also would be extremely worthwhile if we are to see personalized LLMs become common and tools like home assistant. You wouldn't want that running off-site. In fact, I'd rather call home from my mobile LLM than call FAANG (or anyone else with teeth).

I just think buying used servers on ebay or trying to throw together a home rig is harder than it needs to be. I'm confident the demand exists but it is unfortunately a field of dreams scenario. Many people will not know they want it until it exists (I can say my parents would love this but they don't understand the first thing about technology so all they can do is complain about Google/Apple having all their data rather than express how they want to store their own).

[lillecarl]

The problem is tech illiteracy and CGNAT.

The product must be "a router" so people can access it outside of home. Or it doesn't have to, but then you'll have to proxy traffic through you and charge for it.

And your "router server" must have a decent AP, because the likelyhood people know how to bridge their "routeraps" is pretty low.

IPv6 would help for sure, but there's still "allow 443 to this box", static registrations.

This is before even building the product

[godelski]

I don't think you're exactly wrong, but I think it is too narrow.

You're perfectly right that there is far too little tech literacy. Even with the example of my parents. But they're an example of someone who I think would especially benefit from this. Because they wouldn't get it out of their own desire, but because I their child would install it for them. Because I don't want to build and piece together everything. Because I'm used to the general tech support of them calling me up, and having to figure out literally everything on the fly because the only time I touch a Windows system is my yearly Christmas visit.

I've ran a NAS in their home before and the reason they stopped is because they got a new router and "it broke." Prior to that I was able to ssh into their network because I had a pi laying around.

But the problem you specify is not the problem you think it is. It is UI/UX. Many of these things can be set up automatically. The reason PGP is a disaster is because it's cumbersome to use. Google making it default and not having to think about it solved that. Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp made encryption trivial for people who wouldn't have done it before because "it is too hard." I'm unconvinced this is anything different. Where if you take a family member only basically tech literate, can help them do the initial setup, and away you go. You just have to make it as easy as WhatsApp (or even a lot less), and I believe you could.

I say this as someone who is a researcher and does a lot of backend programming. I know we give UI/UX people a lot of shit (and quite often they do deserve it. There are a lot of annoying useless changes), but they do also play a huge role in making technology accessible. Really, that is their main role. And truth be told, the environment has dramatically changed where now a days there's many custom distros that make things easier and even these days my Grandma can use Linux. There's definitely a hardware and backend problem here, but I'm actually convinced the biggest issue is design. Which, let's be real, is what made computers prolific in the first place.

[Springtime]

Edit: misunderstood your premise. You meant bespoke solely single household servers at home. Like homelabs but without the hassle.

Wuala[1][2] did something similar more than a decade ago, in that users become distributed storage for other users which made the service free for those participating (otherwise was a paid subscription). They were then acquired and stopped their most unique feature before closing for good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala

[2] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/08/first-look-wua...

[halfcat]

Servers still fail, regardless of how much redundancy you build in.

Especially in a home, where kids spill a gallon of fruit juice and don’t think to tell anyone until 2 days later, pets knock things off tables, fires happen, power outages happen, theft happens, and so on.

There still needs to be a plan for when the server is gone. So, buy two home servers and run them in different locations? Back to cloud? Or what’s the plan?

[godelski]

I'm not sure what your argument is. Yes? Is not the standard suggestion 3 copies and one off site? And consider that the post is about low egress storage. And what, you're going to tell me that business people don't want to sell more things?

[aseipp]

Well, spinning rust HDDs stuck in your server have no actual parallelism and aren't highly available, replicated, etc.

How much do you think 1TB of storage should cost?

[kjkjadksj]

Even factoring parity drives its still absurd. $55 a year per tb per life and we somehow never see depreciation in spinning rust storage prices hit these plans. If anything they get more costly over time. Why? Their overhead literally goes down every year with depreciating costs of drives and all the other hardware they currently use for their storage arrays.

[fire_lake]

It’s availability that’s expensive.

[disillusioned]

Availability, durability, etc.

[Hamuko]

All those nines cost extra.