I often wonder if these providers actually have the capacity they give away for free. I bet if all subscribers tried to use all of the free capacity at the same time the providers would choke. I also bet that a lot of free storage gets abandoned in the same way as free email accounts..
I see a lot of potential in cloud storage for individuals but the rest of the solution has not caught up yet. I guess what I'm saying is that all of these free terabytes still come across as gimmicks for the vast majority of consumers. I haven't seen a "killer app" that makes a terabyte of cloud storage a game changer for a wide range of consumers. I've tried them all and Apple's iCloud seems to come closest to being invisible and It Just Works quality. Until the pipe gets fast enough to obviate the need for local storage these are mostly just huge thumb drives that live on the end of a very long and relatively slow connector.
Hell, they can change it to 15 TB of "OMG only $7/month!111!!!" and it makes no difference.
Serious non-trolling question here - who has the time and bandwidth to dump 1TB of stuff onto an individual "cloud storage" drive? Restoring from backup would require at least a day or two on a bog-standard 50mbps Cable ISP line, depending on traffic congestion at the local docsis.
I have a mini-NAS at home that can back up or restore 4TB of stuff in way less time (USB 3), and it only eats power maybe once every couple of weeks, when I bother to hook it up, turn it on, and then fire up TimeMachine. The bottleneck there is the HDD in the laptop.
Even though I live in the middle of London in a newly-converted flat, I have an upload of 0.12 MB per second. Nothing faster is available. Don't think I’ll be backing up 1TB of my data to the cloud any day soon.
In the US and Canada the biggest energy consumption are by far heat / air conditionning folllow by home appliance.
Oh. Well, it's all right then for Amazon to use coal as a cheap power source for its Cloud. /s
It's alright for anybody to use coal. Coal is cheap and abundant, and doesn't make huge clouds of black smoke anymore. That's an environmentalist caricature.
It's alright for anybody to use coal. Coal is cheap and abundant, and doesn't make huge clouds of African-American smoke anymore. That's an environmentalist caricature.
Since we're all politically correct here, I fixed that for you.
It's alright for anybody to use coal. Coal is cheap and abundant, and doesn't make huge clouds of African-American smoke anymore. That's an environmentalist caricature.
Since we're all politically correct here, I fixed that for you.
It's alright for anybody to use coal. Coal is cheap and abundant, and doesn't make huge clouds of African-American smoke anymore. That's an environmentalist caricature.
Since we're all politically correct here, I fixed that for you.
Comments
North Korea: Leading the way in energy efficiency:
In the US and Canada the biggest energy consumption are by far heat / air conditionning folllow by home appliance.
Guess which one of those are used by data centers, at around 40% of energy usage.
I see a lot of potential in cloud storage for individuals but the rest of the solution has not caught up yet. I guess what I'm saying is that all of these free terabytes still come across as gimmicks for the vast majority of consumers. I haven't seen a "killer app" that makes a terabyte of cloud storage a game changer for a wide range of consumers. I've tried them all and Apple's iCloud seems to come closest to being invisible and It Just Works quality. Until the pipe gets fast enough to obviate the need for local storage these are mostly just huge thumb drives that live on the end of a very long and relatively slow connector.
Hell, they can change it to 15 TB of "OMG only $7/month!111!!!" and it makes no difference.
Serious non-trolling question here - who has the time and bandwidth to dump 1TB of stuff onto an individual "cloud storage" drive? Restoring from backup would require at least a day or two on a bog-standard 50mbps Cable ISP line, depending on traffic congestion at the local docsis.
I have a mini-NAS at home that can back up or restore 4TB of stuff in way less time (USB 3), and it only eats power maybe once every couple of weeks, when I bother to hook it up, turn it on, and then fire up TimeMachine. The bottleneck there is the HDD in the laptop.
Even though I live in the middle of London in a newly-converted flat, I have an upload of 0.12 MB per second. Nothing faster is available. Don't think I’ll be backing up 1TB of my data to the cloud any day soon.
In the US and Canada the biggest energy consumption are by far heat / air conditionning folllow by home appliance.
Oh. Well, it's all right then for Amazon to use coal as a cheap power source for its Cloud. /s
It's alright for anybody to use coal. Coal is cheap and abundant, and doesn't make huge clouds of black smoke anymore. That's an environmentalist caricature.
Since we're all politically correct here, I fixed that for you.
What's next, "African-American Friday"?
African-American Sabbath.