Is local storage on its way out?

Xelene

Xelene

Xelene

Soldato
Joined
27 Sep 2005
Posts
4,673
Location
London innit
So, I had an interesting experience today that put some of my recent challenges into light.

I currently have around 8TB local storage (which is way on the high side of normal), mostly used and mostly spending its time being unused. I'm hitting a real scaling problem with it, it's all held in one place, rarely accessed and basically hanging off USB ports. I was looking into scaling this, and it was going to be a grand or so to put something in place that would double that storage and put some redundancy in. That was going to cost a grand or two.

Today, I took my laptop into work to use their Internet to reinstall Diablo 3, it would take half a day at home. The game was installed in 4 minutes.

The Internet we've got is already matching optical drives. In a year or three, it's going to out perform spinning sheets of rust (it just about did for me today).

Are we going to have a TB or so of local cache and just stream the rest from the cloud?
 
50gb still takes a while to download on an 80mb fibre connection, so until we are all on 1gbps I dont see it happening for games. Also, who wants to have to download for a few minutes before playing a game? SSD's and RAID 0 SSD's are used for faster and faster load times, to eliminate seconds from a load time.

Media on the other hand, is perfectly feasible to just stream from an online storage facility, until your net breaks, and you then cant do anything on your PC.
 
Ch3m1c4L said:
50gb still takes a while to download on an 80mb fibre connection, so until we are all on 1gbps I dont see it happening for games. Also, who wants to have to download for a few minutes before playing a game? SSD's and RAID 0 SSD's are used for faster and faster load times, to eliminate seconds from a load time.

Media on the other hand, is perfectly feasible to just stream from an online storage facility, until your net breaks, and you then cant do anything on your PC.
Click to expand...

I'm not entirely sure what the Internet connect at the office is, but I suspect I was bottlenecked on the USB3 gigabit ethernet adaptor. However I was getting 45MB a second (Mega Byte not Mega bit!).

In personal use, I've already moved my music online entirely, once the Internets get faster for home use I can see my video collection going the same way - I have fairly crappy Internet (at home) and I can get decent quality 1080p video at around 1 minute of video in 1 minute of download. That work connection would do 1 minute of video in 2 seconds.

If other media is anything to go by, games will be streamed also. The binaries generally are tiny, they just have big asset blobs.

We may need to wait a few years for this :)

And we'll cache stuff we need and access frequently locally.
 
With 13 terabyte in my pc, I'm gonna say cloud storage has a long way to go, the internet just isn't fast enough yet
 
Yeah I get that, but it's not exactly going to be possible to stream a blu ray in the UK anytime soon
 
My home NAS is going to get retired in favour of a dedicated file server (or rather a virtual one) in the next year or two, but I suspect for Joe Bloggs it wont be an easy option for a while. Having access to a tier 3 datacentre and 100mbps fibre at home helps though
 
I doubt very much that the internet is anywhere near fast enough and reliable enough yet.

Vocationally, I use files which are around 400GB - 3TB in file size, but are broken up into 4GB chunks. There is just no way that the internet can provide me the same speed that a NAS can. Even if it could, the fault tolerance should an error occur during data communication would get ridiculous due to the constant read requests being fired backwards and forwards all the time.

Besides, virtualised/cloud storage are only as reliable your internet and the hosts - what can you do if your off-site off-country storage provider disappears overnight? What about that urgent report you needed to complete on the cloud, however your internet is currently down, so you cannot do it...

The rest of what you're talking about is like Citrix XenApps and Terminal Servers/thin clients... it might work for basic low-load applications, but for intensive software, it will fail miserably.
 
Last edited:
I don't think so, us dirty peasants that live out in the country can get speeds as low as 0.3mbps to 7 on a really good day.
 
Until the day comes that we can access content online instantly no matter the size i'd say local storage is safe.
 
In short, not for a long time.

We've got SSDs hitting 6Gbps SATA3 limit and more, I can't see it being matched by affordable local NAS any time soon, let alone the 'cloud'.

And with SSDs dropping in price and increasing in size, they'll be our storage drives before the Cloud.
 
Everyone is better off having a home server and a back up in place. Nothing beats local storage atm period. I demand my phone has sd ability so I can store my music local also. The internet just isn't suitable or reliable yet.
 
I don't think I'll ever be happy put my data on the cloud only I'll always have a hard copy somewhere ;) I have about 8tb of data on hard drives
 
Hopefully by the time internet speed eventually gets to the viable point for this the competition will force better prices. So many online back-up solutions come and go that the reliable ones that you know will still be around in years to come prices aren't exactly cheap. Right now it's actually cheaper to rent a low spec dedicated server in a datacenter than use most of the sites for this type of thing when it comes to TB's of online backup unless you use a site that may or may not be around in future.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom