Amazing SSD and Hard Drive Deals on Amazon

The first terabyte hard drive had been introduced 2 years ago. Nowadays you can buy 1 TB hard drives for less than $100. Great capacity at an affordable price!


2009 will be the year when Solid State Drives (SSDs) will become mainstream by offering faster disk performance and greater durability than traditional hard drives. Since they use NAND flash memory instead of spinning platters for storage, there's no waiting for disks to spin up, and there are no moving parts to worry about breaking down.

Amazon offers great deals (up to 64% discount) on traditional hard drives and SSD storage. Have a look at these selected bestsellers of Western Digital Hard Drives and Intel SSDs:

• WD My Book Essential Edition 1 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U10000N
  1 TB external USB disk for $120 (save 25%)
• WD Caviar Green 1 TB Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, SATA II WD10EADS
  1 TB 3.5" internal disk for $90 (save 35%)
• WD My Passport Essential 320 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive WDME3200TN
  320 GB portable USB disk for $90 (save 31%)
• WD 1TB GreenPower AV 16MB Cache 25dBA Hard Drive WD10EVCS
  1 TB low noise disk for audiovisual applications like TiVo for $109 (save 64%!)
• Intel SSDSA2MH080G1C5 X25-M 80GB 2.5 Inch Solid State Drive (MLC SSD)
  80GB mainstream SSD for $325 (save 49%!)

These are the top hard drives and SSD for now. Can they keep up with the huge storage requirements of HD video content?

Wuala Launches P2P Online Storage Cloud

Wuala has launched a hybrid P2P social online file sharing service.

Wuala provides secure online storage and backup for all kinds of files (including photos and large videos). Accessible from anywhere at any time and easy sharing with friends, family, and co-workers. 1 GB is free of charge and additional capacity is available either by trading in your local storage of buying more from Wuala at a reasonable starting price of $25 for 10GB.

The Wuala client supports Windows, Mac and Linux. I look forward to downloading a client for the Apple iPhone on the iTunes App Store. Is this the way to the TeraPod?

On the technical side the Wuala has an interesting P2P architecture. Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage.

Dominik Grolimund, the founder of the Swiss startup Caleido, discusses interesting details in this Google Tech Talk video.

Amazon EC2 Flash Video Streaming

The ability to host web video clips in the Cloud is getting near with the release of the Wowza Pro media server for Amazon EC2 (beta).

Wowza Media Server Pro Unlimited is a high-performance, extensible and a fully interactive, Flash media server for live and on-demand flv streaming, chat and recording.

Wowza Media Systems has teamed with Amazon Web Services to make billing quick, easy, and secure for the combination of Wowza Media Server Pro, machine time with various EC2 instances and bandwidth.

Pricing of Wowza Pro Unlimited for Amazon EC2 is:

• Instances
• $0.14 per Small Instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)
• $0.45 per Large Instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)
• $0.88 per Extra-Large instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)
• Data Transfer
• $0.12 per GB of data transfer in
• $0.20 per GB of data transfer out
• Monthly Charge
• $5.00 recurring monthly charge

This pricing includes all charges for the use of Wowza Pro instances on Amazon EC2 (both Wowza Pro licensing and Amazon EC2 fees).

It is still in beta so improvements might be expected related to

• performance
• load-balancing
• using Amazon S3 for hosting videos
• management

Streaming video using Amazon EC2 and S3 is a great utility computing and storage application. It could help startups with limited resources to compete with youtube and other video hosting services. Check out the user guide and the forum to learn more.

Recommended books on Flash Video Streaming:

• Hands-On Guide to Flash Video: Web Video and Flash Media Server
• Flash Video for Professionals: Expert Techniques for Integrating Video on the Web
• Networking IP Video: Video on your IP Network - Streaming, Surveillance, Conferencing, Telepresence, and Video Telephony - and How to Deploy them all (Cisco Technology Series)
• Hands-On Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting: Emerging Media Tools for Business Communication

It is Time to Learn Amazon EC2 and S3

Utility computing is here to conquer the IT world! Amazon Vice President Adam Selipsky has recently unveiled the newest statistics on usage of Amazon S3. Their 265,000+ developer community has now stored over 10 billion (10,000,000,000) objects in S3 at a rate of 27,601 transactions per second. That's huge progress compared to the 5 billion objects just a few months ago!

Programmers and web developers should really look forward to books such as Programming Web Services - S3, EC2, SQS, and FPS by James Murty. The book will cover the most disruptive and useful web services available today:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (just launched in Europe!)
  
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (now in beta with new instances)
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (offers reliable and scalable hosted queue)
• Amazon Flexible Payments Service (still in limited beta)

To illustrate the power of the Amazon Web Services check out this blog entry by Derek Gottfrid: Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun!

The New York Times has decided to make all the public domain articles from 1851-1922 available free of charge. These articles are all in the form of images scanned from the original paper. In fact from 1851-1980, all 11 million articles are available as images in PDF format. To generate a PDF version of the article takes quite a bit of work!

Derek has achieved this with the help of Amazon S3/EC2 and Hadoop!

I quickly got to work copying 4TB of data to S3. Next I started writing code to pull all the parts that make up an article out of S3, generate a PDF from them and store the PDF back in S3. This was easy enough using the JetS3t — Open Source Java toolkit for S3, iText PDF Library and installing the Java Advanced Image Extension.

For deployment, I created a custom AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for EC2 that was based on a Xen image from my desktop machine. I logged in, started Hadoop and submitted a test job to generate a couple thousands articles — and to my surprise it just worked. It churned through all 11 million articles in just under 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances, and generated another 1.5TB of data to store in S3.

Now that this adventure can be called a success, I can’t imagine how we might have done it without Amazon S3 / EC2 . The one caveat I will offer to people who are interested in doing something like this is that it is highly addictive.

Indeed an interesting utility computing success story!

IT Futurology : What Could Happen to the Web by 2012?

What will happen when the MySpace generation grows-up? When employees want Facebook rather than a phonebook? When your monthly report is on your iPhone, your spreadsheet's on your Wiki, your e-mail's moved to Google, you haven't got a home directory (or a PC) any more, and blogging's no longer a buzzword - it's just what everybody does to stay employed? Tune in to Alec Muffett's entertaining presentation on blip.tv to find out!

Alec projects current trends and discusses the possibility of a terabyte iPod by 2012. In comparison a recent Hitachi announcement expects the 4TB desktop and 1TB notebook hard disk drives by 2011. Until then we can buy the industry's first cost effective desktop terabyte drive, the Hitachi 0A34915 1TB 7200Rpm 32MB Cache SATA II Hard Drive.

Check out Alec Muffett's blog for more on IT futurology and security.

Google Offers up to 250GB Storage for GMail and Picasa!

With the Google shared storage plan, you can purchase additional storage for your files, pictures, or emails. Google services (e.g. email and photos) will share your single new storage space. The initial price offering:

• 6 GB ($20.00 per year)
• 25 GB ($75.00 per year)
• 100 GB ($250.00 per year)
• 250 GB ($500.00 per year)

This extra storage acts as overflow when you run out of free storage space in either service. More details here: Google Paid Storage

Low Cost Online Backup with Amazon S3

How do you backup your critical data? Traditional backup procedures use regular copy sessions to tape, disk or CD-R/DVD-R media. The broadband internet allows companies to provide online backup services. Such online systems can easily scale and provide cost effective remote backup for a wide range of customers. However they are definitely not one-size-fits-all.

Consumer oriented online backup offering such as Carbonite, Mozy or XDrive has a typical price of ~$1/GB/month although limited free services are available. Check out this review on ars technica for details.

Another solution is to use the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) with the s3sync tool or the Amazon S3 Firefox Orgainzer plug-in (S3Fox). Pricing ($0.15/month for a GB of stored data) is really attractive compared to the above services.

Find out more in these practical how to guides:

• How I automated my backups to Amazon S3 using s3sync
• How To: Bulletproof Server Backups with Amazon S3

The First Terabyte Hard Drive

Commercial history of hard disk drives began with the IBM Model 350 disk storage with fifty 24" disks and a capacity of 5MBs in 1956. Their capacity has grown exponentially over time - that means 10 times capacity increase in each 5 years.

Today 1,000,000,000,000 bytes of capacity is provided by the world's first Terabyte Hard Drive: The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 with five 3.5" platters. At the suggested retail price of $399 it offers an impressive $0.39/gig ratio!

It is finally possible to store all of our favorite images, music and movies on one hard drive.

Amazon + Two Guys + $0 = Next YouTube

Utility computing and storage is changing the way web services are built.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy and affordable:

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred (cheap bandwidth makes this possible)

The next YouTube will be built on Amazon’s Web Services by two guys in a dorm for roughly $0 (see SmugBlog). Amazon S3 now has 5 billion objects stored in it. What's more, it had 920 million S3 requests on its peak day, and 16,607 requests in its peak second (see ReadWriteWeb).

Sun Microsystems offers Utility Computing @ network.com for $1/CPU-hr.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy and affordabe at $0.10/instance-hour! It is in limited beta but already popular.

Google has many assets and APIs related to utility computing. All kind of data can be stored in Google Base. Their web-scale distributed computing platform is well known. This paper on the Google Filesystem gives us a peek into the future of Web applications and platforms.

Who will build the next YouTube on these utility computing platforms?