How much would you pay for unlimited storage?

[immamac 42835]

What would unlimited or seemingly unlimited storage be for you individually and how much would you pay to never have to think about storage again, one time monthly or annual answers acceptable. 

When I say storage I mean the raw storage, in the form of external or internal drives, USB sticks, Cards or any other cartridge media type you use. Assume the warranty doesn't matter because it'll be replaced every year and you can have enough to implement 3-2-1 for your entire data footprint. (3 copies, 2 different types of media, 1 off site) 

You can stick them or plug them into whatever you want though up to and including servers that can give you a cloudlike experience. 

First tell me how much you think you would need (10x what your current data footprint is) then tell me the price you think you would pay and that price wouldn't change for 10 years. 

[bigcigar 1164]

3.5TB.

tree fiddy

[Celery Man 20931]

Quick version... $10/mo, and "unlimited storage" to me is somewhere between 200 gigs and 2 TB, probably 1 TB. But "never think about storage again" means "never have to try hard to find something" more than "never run out of bits".

$10/mo is what I currently pay for 2 TB Google Drive. I have 250 gigs on there currently, but 75% of that are ultra high quality wedding videos. I probably have some more stuff that I need to back up from my laptop, but given that I don't hoard much digital music or movies/TV any longer, I don't directly use as much storage as I used to.

I wouldn't pay that much to just have a drive or blob or whatever - I'm sure I could pay quite a bit less to stick the wedding stuff on cheap cloud storage and then use a cheaper smaller tier of Google (and maybe I should). What I'm really paying for is to be able to take pictures and video all the time and never lose anything and never think about it and be able to easily find all the halloween pictures of my daughter or "kevin in a cowboy hat" and sure as shit it found the pictures of my dog wearing a cowboy hat.

Honestly I don't do much for local backup beyond occasionally copying what i have in cloud storage onto my macbook. I think the thumb drives with the wedding stuff and some old family videos are rattling around in my file drawer, as are some hard drives that contain a lot of garbage along with recordings/audio I'd hate to actually lose. If my personal computer got thrown into some sort of thresher tomorrow I don't think I'd miss anything. It's all in email or cloud.

[bluto 4912]

This a continuation of that Richard gere style “pet project” you were touting?

[bigcigar 1164]

100tb for gamepass library + 3tb for everything else.

Maybe $10/month because @Celery Man made a good point.

[Pato del Muerto 52485]

Would this be for personal or business use?

i have a live cell imager at work that I can easily and quickly make files in the 100s of gigs for, and I would if space was not a constraint. 

[Wally Fairway 5539]

Jebus, some of you have a lot of pron storage needs

[immamac 42835]

42 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Would this be for personal or business use?

i have a live cell imager at work that I can easily and quickly make files in the 100s of gigs for, and I would if space was not a constraint. 

Either, for the original prompt personal but throw in your biz thing. 

[Pato del Muerto 52485]

7 minutes ago, immamac said:

Either, for the original prompt personal but throw in your biz thing. 

We have a couple of instruments that are super heavy in very high res images.  Hundreds per file. In heavy use, they could rack up multiple Tb per month.  100 Tb might not even last 2 years- esp since it all gets backed up too. 
 

not a clue how to price that. Current state is each has a 10 Tb external drive that has a mirrored drive second blade as a backup. 

Edited April 18, 2023 by Pato del Muerto

[immamac 42835]

11 hours ago, bigcigar said:

100tb for gamepass library + 3tb for everything else.

Maybe $10/month because @Celery Man made a good point.

The entire gamepass library for every game is only 3.1TB. So 6TB? 

[SimonBolivar 10957]

50TB for Plex related storage, but I enjoy price hunting for drives and not having a monthly payment. I'd guess maybe $100/yr would be enticing but that seems unreasonable for so much storage.

[immamac 42835]

1 minute ago, SimonBolivar said:

50TB for Plex related storage, but I enjoy price hunting for drives and not having a monthly payment. I'd guess maybe $100/yr would be enticing but that seems unreasonable for so much storage.

You actually have a 50TB plex library or is that including 3-2-1? 

 

[jeevsie 3733]

[SimonBolivar 10957]

45 minutes ago, immamac said:

You actually have a 50TB plex library or is that including 3-2-1? 

 

3-2-1 (well 2-2-0) but there are people that claim a library size at much bigger than 50TB. I may have to rethink my entire system once I start converting my old stuff to 4k. 

Edited April 18, 2023 by SimonBolivar

[immamac 42835]

1 minute ago, SimonBolivar said:

3-2-1 (well 2-1-0) but there are people that claim a library size at much bigger than 50TB. I may have to rethink my entire system once I start converting my old stuff to 4k. 

So my theory is there are 3-4 stratifications of people. 3-2-1 for all numbers here. 

Biggest footprint (20-50TB+) - Data Hoarders, irrational storage of everything, often technical enough to deploy their own NAS or equivalent and more media than they can possibly consume in a lifetime, but freedom from any and all subscriptions. Can tell you the difference between KB MB GB and TB with ease and how much certain media takes up. 

Big footprint (5-20TB) - Data Collectors, aware of data and it's usefulness willing to pay a bit more for offline capability or local cache. Can tell the difference between big and small files but doesn't really comprehend things that are 10-100GB+ 

Normal (100GB-5TB) - General Consumer, completely unaware of data and usage is convenience and subscription to enable convenience based. Has no idea what filesizes mean outside of MB and how it matches to their internet connection. 

Small (<100GB) - a low multimedia user (Boomers+ who don't digitize mainly). No concept of storage differentiated from ram - computers do computer shit. 

[SimonBolivar 10957]

58 minutes ago, immamac said:

So my theory is there are 3-4 stratifications of people. 3-2-1 for all numbers here. 

Biggest footprint (20-50TB+) - Data Hoarders, irrational storage of everything, often technical enough to deploy their own NAS or equivalent and more media than they can possibly consume in a lifetime, but freedom from any and all subscriptions. Can tell you the difference between KB MB GB and TB with ease and how much certain media takes up. 

Big footprint (5-20TB) - Data Collectors, aware of data and it's usefulness willing to pay a bit more for offline capability or local cache. Can tell the difference between big and small files but doesn't really comprehend things that are 10-100GB+ 

Normal (100GB-5TB) - General Consumer, completely unaware of data and usage is convenience and subscription to enable convenience based. Has no idea what filesizes mean outside of MB and how it matches to their internet connection. 

Small (<100GB) - a low multimedia user (Boomers+ who don't digitize mainly). No concept of storage differentiated from ram - computers do computer shit. 

With storage becoming relatively cheap recently this seems like a pretty good idea for a business model. Are you expecting prices to continue to fall for a bit?

[Captainant 27625]

I've got 4x10TB drives in my NAS for 27TB of addressable storage, and other 10TB usable or so between harvested spinning disks and NVMe drives. The vast majority of the data on my NAS is plex content which isn't the end of the world if I lose - that data is re-acquirable.

The shit I DO care about like old family photos and documents, shit that's irreplacable and I'm doing 3-2-1 with currently, is more like 4-5TB in total.

[HamsterHookah 112]

This is embarrassing. 

I pay $21.31/month for Dropbox. I have up to 3 TB of which I am using 18.7 GB's.

Further I have 100 GB of storage through Google One, of which I am using 16.82 GBs and pay $1.99/month.

I splurged for the 256 GB iPhone 14 recently because the 128 GB wasn't enough. I used 103.3 GB on this new phone after deleting old messages and videos that I didn't need.

Edited April 18, 2023 by HamsterHookah

[Liquor and Poker 3659]

I have a lot of furniture from consolidating houses.  I pay about $300/mo for a shed that's not big enough.  I'd gladly pay a little more for unlimited space.

[Rimbo 25910]

If the amount I need costs less for the unlimited price than it does for the per-byte price, I'll pay for it. If it doesn't, I won't.

I currently pay $99/yr for Google One's 2TB plan, of which I use 262GB. So if you can beat that, and integrate with Photos, and Drive, I'm in.

If not, I'm out.

At work, I'd have to do the math.

[Upgrayedd 5810]

A bit more than my first computer.  40 MB hard drive that I had to partition.  Thought I was king shit.  3.5” floppy drive too.  5-3/4” were for cavemen.

[Celery Man 20931]

11 hours ago, immamac said:

 

Normal (100GB-5TB) - General Consumer, completely unaware of data and usage is convenience and subscription to enable convenience based. Has no idea what filesizes mean outside of MB and how it matches to their internet connection. 

 

[NotActuallyALonghorn 4974]

Well, knowledge of computers and file sizes apparently causes you to download unfathomable amounts of porn.

[bigcigar 1164]

On 4/18/2023 at 7:33 AM, immamac said:

The entire gamepass library for every game is only 3.1TB. So 6TB? 

 

On 4/17/2023 at 7:28 PM, immamac said:

First tell me how much you think you would need (10x what your current data footprint is

My quick troll google came back with 10TB

https://www.gamesradar.com/this-wd-hard-drive-can-hold-the-entire-game-pass-library-4-times-and-still-have-space-left-over/

 

I fit squarely in the normal category. My storage consists of family pictures my wife takes and stupid pictures of my friends, food and sometimes the kids…largely isolated to phones with a 2TB apple family share plan (because wife maxed out 200GB). I stream everything, use my friends youtubetv account for sports and generally have a pretty low data footprint outside of phones.

Except gamepass…always close to capacity on the Xbox between stuff I try and stuff my kids play (doesn’t take much). To get around this pain, I upgraded to a 2 gbps which moved Xbox downloads from 300-500mbps to 800-850mbps. I don’t swap games often, but like downloading faster than my friends when we’re online together. Obviously not super rational.

It doesn’t seem like I’m in the target market, but if I paid $30/month more for bandwidth that really doesn’t benefit me much, I’d think an option to save that by just having all games might make sense. I’m a middle aged idiot though so probably not or I’d have bought more storage already.

[Gravy Train 974]

I have six spindles of 16TB WD Gold fitted to a Synology DS1621xs+ that hosts everything from Plex to Homebridge, Time Machine, Google, and OneDrive backups.  It then mirrors (via HyperBackup) to a Synology DS1517 with five spindles of 16TB WD Red Pro.  Yeah, I've spent enough on storage for a while.

[MonkeyDoughnut 10227]

I've reached that point where I view data storage like home clutter and am trying to have less and not more. Put me in the 5TB club and maybe $50/year with those decreasing over time. I deal with rolling 10's of TBs of data at work and it's such a pain to move, backup, recover, etc that I'm sure it's responsible for that feeling.

I'm definitely in the more is not better club now.

[Fudge Nuggets 19187]

Capacity:  200 bajillion TB

Price:  Fuck all

[Guest]

I keep reading the thread title as ‘How Much Would You Pay For Unlimited Strange?’

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

Guarantee me 200TB/mth forever, with auto-scaling storage (% of mth fee is reasonable) and regional backup for any file type where i can use a single endpoint for universal data access, I'd pay $100/mth since I would view this as a "utility".

[B00M 6413]

4 hours ago, Shaggy3.0 said:

Guarantee me 200TB/mth forever, with auto-scaling storage (% of mth fee is reasonable) and regional backup for any file type where i can use a single endpoint for universal data access, I'd pay $100/mth since I would view this as a "utility".

That sounds… excessive 

[ScottS 1061]

[Shaggy3.0 1695]

On 4/21/2023 at 8:54 PM, B00M said:

That sounds… excessive 

What's excessive?  The storage feature request or the cost?

The idea of "never worry about storage again" is where things are headed.   I'm involved with a project similar to Solid, and it requires and supports the idea if unlimited storage.  https://solidproject.org/about

I think $100/month to not worry or think about digital real estate is not a big ask.

 

[Elvis 3371]

I've been using Dropbox mirrored to a 2TB drive in my PC for 10+ years.  I use a little over 1TB.  I mirror what I need/want to my laptop.  That's about $130 month.  That holds just about everything I've ever created or photographed including college.  I take a ton of photos for work, plus all the other stuff.

[52-80 19144]

motherfucker you should be paying *me* to keep *my* data.

[Slacks 6819]

On 4/18/2023 at 8:50 AM, immamac said:

So my theory is there are 3-4 stratifications of people. 3-2-1 for all numbers here. 

Biggest footprint (20-50TB+) - Data Hoarders, irrational storage of everything, often technical enough to deploy their own NAS or equivalent and more media than they can possibly consume in a lifetime, but freedom from any and all subscriptions. Can tell you the difference between KB MB GB and TB with ease and how much certain media takes up. 

Big footprint (5-20TB) - Data Collectors, aware of data and it's usefulness willing to pay a bit more for offline capability or local cache. Can tell the difference between big and small files but doesn't really comprehend things that are 10-100GB+ 

Normal (100GB-5TB) - General Consumer, completely unaware of data and usage is convenience and subscription to enable convenience based. Has no idea what filesizes mean outside of MB and how it matches to their internet connection. 

Small (<100GB) - a low multimedia user (Boomers+ who don't digitize mainly). No concept of storage differentiated from ram - computers do computer shit. 

How am I all of these?