| 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 |