For those who consider the Cloud to be an option for their Libraries consider the following excerpt from a recent article on Cloud Storage Pricing

To those that don't know, Amazon S3 are the largest single Storage Provider in the world and used by many multi-nationals for their Cloud Offerings.......including Microsoft and Apple

Quote
Let�s start instead by looking at the leading cloud storage provider, Amazon. With petabytes of storage in the cloud and billions of objects, Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla of the industry. Amazon also has made great use of economies of scale to offer one of the least expensive cloud storage offerings on the market:

Amazon�s current pricing is $0.125/GB/month. So, take the case of a customer that wants to store 5TB within the next 3 years and, for simplicity�s sake, assume they grow that capacity linearly from 0 to 5TB over the 36 months.

The total cost over 3 years would be $11,563 or $2.31/GB.
And that's for 5Tb........hardly enough for both Music and Movie Libraries........sure the prices will come down over time, but........

Cloud Storage has definite Upsides (e.g. Dropbox is a super service as long as you take the necessary security steps).......but it's not yet ready for Media Libraries IMHO

Two other significant issues to consider outside of the Storage Costs

a) With the Real World Upload Internet speeds that we deal with, how long would it take you to upload that same 5Tb........and how would your Internet Provider react??

b) In a Disaster Recovery situation, how long would it take you to recover that same 5Tb.........i.e. how long would it be before you had your Library restored at home???..........what about your Fair Use restrictions with your Internet Provider??.........most would not allow 5Tb to be downloaded in a Month, never mind a few days

What MAY be possible over time is a service similar to "iTunes Match", where your Library is matched as a Subset of the much larger iTunes Library............but will the Music companies ever allow that option with Lossless Music

Likewise, will they ever allow that with Bluray Quality Movies??

Summary: NAS type Storage Devices will be with us for quite some time to come

Last edited by Ronnie; 2011-12-30 14:52.
-