Could the "cloud" keep up speed-wise? Your calculations should include the added cost of gigabit internet to even come close.

BackBlaze B2 is probably the lowest price S3-like cloud provider and for 50TB (my current dataset size), it would be ~$250/mo: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

Granted I didn't do this math before I dropped a few stacks on hardware. I really wanted to build it, configure it, play with it, etc. It's been a really fun project for me, and I've got a bunch of other stuff I want to do with it in the next few years (10GbE, X11 nodes, set up dedupe, etc).

Getting 60TB of usable space in the cloud is pretty expensive. Honestly I have no idea why he needs so much space, but if he does need it all, he probably didn't make out too badly. One of the main benefits of the cloud, though, is that you only pay for what you use, and he has to over-provision from the beginning, so let's consider that.

So he's currently using about 10TB of 60TB of usable space. If he uses Amazon S3's standard storage, he would be paying about $230/mo. If he uses infrequent storage that is $125/mo. That goes up as his usage goes, so when he's using 30TB that will be $690/mo and $375/mo respectively. He also has the benefit of high speed ethernet with the home NAS, unless he has fiber 1Gig internet, in which case speed is probably a wash. I'm not sure if there are other significantly cheaper cloud storage solutions at that scale.

So I'd say he hasn't done too badly for himself, though he probably could have saved some on the hardware by getting cheaper parts.

> So he's currently using about 10TB of 60TB of usable space.

Other way around; he's using ~50TB of ~60TB with ~10TB free.

> Getting 60TB of usable space in the cloud is pretty expensive.

Amazon cloud drive is unlimited and 60$ a year.