Well yeah. S3 is ~$23/TB/month vs $10/TB HDD NRC + $0.20/TB/month electricity for a data hoarder NAS. I can’t imagine S3 users are very price sensitive. Most of them store <1PB.

Of course there are cheaper cloud services like B2 at $5/TB/mo, but even that can’t compete on price with physical infra when you have more than a handful of drives.

Not that it changes the math much, but:

$15/TB is hard enough for a home buyer to reach for hard drives, excluding server cost. Where did you get $10?

Not them, but searching for "8TB HDD" on Amazon (huh, ironic) shows several options for $90, which is almost $10/TB. And this was 60 seconds of searching, no real effort put in.

$15/TB is extremely expensive if you’re building a raidz2 array.

$9.70/TB 10TB: https://www.ebay.com/itm/275400447467

$8.31/TB 4x8TB: https://www.ebay.com/itm/125132232253

You can get even cheaper if you buy in bulk.

Server cost is $1/TB with reasonable density

Oh. Used drives.

they should at least etch our names into the yacht that the savings will buy

As a cloud employee I am willing to make the public commitment that should I ever be in the position of buying a yacht, I will etch "booi" into the hull for you.

That's what competition is for.

Google/Azure should compress and pass the savings back to the customer..

Well if they figure they will get more customers to offset lower profits they’ll reduce the price. On the other hand if they think they can double the price but only lose 10% of customers they’ll do that

It’s econ101, the cost of providing the service doesn’t really factor into the price charged, what does factor in is the cost of alternatives (storage from azure, backblaze, on prem, not doing it), and the risks (increase s3 costs and people might realise they are being ripped off on ec2)

Yes. The cost of providing the service only factors indirectly into the price charged: via competition.

I'm not holding my breath