And game traffic which is even more time sensitive is somehow different?

The fact is that Netflix drives demand for AT&T's services - especially the higher capacity ones. They're bitching about having to invest in more capacity even though they're able to oversell what capacity they do build. Someone has to pay for this investment, that is true, and it's the customers who are paying $65/mo for 45Mbps connections and the $10/50GB beyond the cap. Interesting fact though, according to AT&T themselves:

"In fact, less than 2% of AT&T High Speed Internet users utilize more than 150GB per month." - AT&T Broadband FAQ

So, if the vast majority of users are using less than 150GB/month that means, on average, it's less than 5GB/day of traffic - by their own advertising that means that they are serving 98% of their customers at full capacity for 16 to 232 minutes a day (16mins@45Mbps, 232mins@3Mbps).

^this is infinitely better than the summary/article linked to.

:D

In my world geek news sources it's information - "The Chinese photo" would be shown or linked to. GPS coordinates would be accurate not "almost" a vague coordinate. The linked article is a bad rehash of 3rd party information - it's generic mainstream "news" to sell ads to people who can't tell the difference between a well researched detailed story and a piece of abstracted reworded junk.

If only it matched up to a great story. Anyone have any geek news?

This is the kind of geek info I expect on Slashdot, not some crappy slate article. Thank you!

The 9x figure was a rudimentary calculation that didn't factor in all costs, just estimated a $65 1TB drive with a 5 year lifetime. $120*5 years = $600 / $65 = 9.23. Factoring the electricity costs (which I over estimated for my region - actual cost is 7c/h for most of the day, 12.8 during peak times and 10ish during mid-peak hours. Also the cost of the drive was over-estimated, actual drive on newegg.ca was $60 for a toshiba 1TB drive)

$47.45*5 + $60 = $297 - so it's twice as much. 1.68 times if you factor a 2nd backup drive.

the Dell was just an example. PSUs are far more efficient than they were 4-5 years ago - even the cheap ones.

50 watts extra? for what? You're not running a monitor, no extra PCI devices, no DVD/Bluray, etc, not even a keyboard/mouse. Maybe if you're using something built in 2009 or earlier... Take a Dell Optiplex 990 (Win7)- 33-37 watts under moderate usage. 28 while idle.

oops! made a mistake: Over 5 years it would be $516.25 vs $599.40 factoring electric costs properly.

It's cheaper for me because 1) I didn't have to buy a new computer for the setup 2) I'm in a building with inclusive utilities

I see you didn't read the rest of the comments in this thread.

$20/m is insane. Try $47.45/year at 1kwh/day * 13c/kwh

I'd never use raid in this kind of setup - too much room for failure. Just independent backups done at separate times. $120 worth of drives is far different than $600 worth of service over a 5 year period. You can mitigate the batch issue by purchasing drives from different manufacturers or using price match and buying from different stores.

Again, you'd have to have those failures occur at the same time as the main drive failure which is unlikely. Internet is always on and paid for regardless. Power is a cost but we're talking $100 a year if you were drawing 130W constantly, for me that's offset by the fact that it's used for other services as well. A basic system from 3 years ago will draw 30-60W under moderate usage. The cost of the system itself is zero as there are so many old desktops floating around that you can get free it's scary. If you really want to factor it in, without doing much research (single website, 5 minute lookup for lowest cost items that would be compatible): $159 (PSU: $15, MB $45, CPU $45, $30, RAM $24) + $120 for the drives. We'll split the difference and say you consume roughly 1kwh/day (~42W constant draw) at 13 cents per kwh (much higher than I pay). Total cost over a 5 year period: $326.45 vs Google's $599.40

Those remote chances must also occur at the same time as a main drive failure.

It's not that much time investment if you know what you're doing. Took about 2 hours of configuration and very little ongoing maintenance. The biggest limitations I've found are the scheduling of P2P away from the backup times and backup failures due to misbehaving routers. It definitely helps that we're both in urban areas that are well serviced by ISPs. It wouldn't be possible without the 10Mbps upload speed on either end.

That is true, the servers were already setup for other reasons so that wasn't a cost factor for me, but if you don't have those already they would be part of it. Not a major part though, the server they're on now was an old system that lost it's usefulness as a desktop. You don't need anything significant, just something capable of interfacing with the extra drives. They need an odd reboot/security updates but most of that is automated/can be done remotely. Maybe once every few months I'll call over and get them to reset manually. It's very much setup and forget.