I was recently surprised to learn that large disk arrays can be much cheaper
if you self-host them versus, well versus pretty much any "cloud" storage
provider.

One of my clients had a 6TB software RAID-10 array hosted at EC2 that was
costing them $1,200 per month [EC2 is about $100/TB, by far the cheapest
cloud storage around. RAID-5 was far too slow for that size array, so
RAID-10 was used for speed, but unfortunately needs double the storage, so
this was 12TB total storage]. After pricing various alternatives, I found
the cheapest by far was a $400/month rental of 4U of rack space at a nearby
co-lo facility. After the overhead of purchasing hardware (about $2500 for a
1U server and 2U SATA disk array), they have 16TB of offsite storage with
two hot-swap spare disks. After two months, it will have earned back the
cost of the hardware. I'm sure that every couple of years I'll need to
replace a disk or two, but that is still far cheaper than EC2.

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