Tuesday, February 5, 2008, 9:26pm
Beyond the monetary issue, there's also the issue of bandwidth. Photoshelter wins here by letting you send in a hard drive for uploading data. While FedEx and UPS have a bit more latency than a TCP/IP connection, you simply can't beat the bandwidth of sticking a hard drive into a box and having it show up somewhere else the next day with all of its data. With Amazon S3 and Mozy, I don't know of an equivalent service, therefore you have to wait for the uploads to happen. How long? Well, for me, my upload bandwidth is a pretty respectable 768Kb/s. Even at that speed, however, uploading a lot of data takes a lot of time.
Here's the math: 768Kb/s is 96KB/s is 0.09375MB/s. Multiply by 3600 and you get 337.5MB/hr. Multiply by another 24 and you get 8100MB/day--equivalent to an 8GB compact flash card per day. From there, you can extrapolate out to about 130 days--or a bit over 4 months--to upload a TB of data. I could always 'borrow' a T3 at a friends office, but even with that, it'd take a bit over 2 days to upload the data--assuming, of course, that S3 could intake the data at that speed.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
Andrew Tanenbaum was right and probably will be for a while since it seems harddrives are growing faster than my local intertube.