I never realized how my personal data storage needs were affecting my finances. After doing a recent backup, I discovered that I have more than a Terabyte (that’s 1000 Gigabytes folks) of disk space which includes information spanning the last decade or so. The thought of my beloved stuff being lost to the void is frightening, so maybe these expenses are justified, maybe not. Either way it brought me to the uncomfortable place of realizing that in the long run I’m going to have to figure out a more cost effective solution.

My Personal Data Storage Costs
At Home I have two Dell Dimensions, one that is my development and workstation (the Pentium 4), and another which runs as a file server and download station (the Pentium 3). The Server contains two 250GB and one 170GB disks in a RAID configuration, plus an 80GB disk to run Windows. I also have an external 500GB Western Digital MyBook Drive and a 250GB SimpleTech Drive. I decided to measure my total power usage for my computers (including external drives) by using a recently purchased Kill A Watt and found that they consume roughly 165 watt-hours of power with the both CPUs in idle.

That’s about 27.720 watt hours every week!

One watt-hour (abbreviated W*hr) is the amount of (usually electrical) energy expended by a one-watt load (e.g. light bulb) drawing power for one hour. See Wikipedia entry for watts

According to local power rates my costs are roughly $0.16 per kilowatt hour.

So 27.720 kilowatt hours x 0.16 = $4.42 / wk

My home computers costs me roughly a minimum of $20 every four weeks just to leave powered on and idling, for a total of about $240 a year!.

Considering the costs of purchasing my two computers, roughly $20/mo each. That’s another $40 a month

Ouch! that’s $40 + $20 = $60 every four weeks just to store my decade worth of data. That’s as about as much as my cell phone plan!

That puts the total cost for 5 years worth of data storage around $3600 (assuming that no hardware breaks) which include the costs of electricity and hardware, but in no way accounts for the time it might take for me to manage my server.

Those costs seem outrageous. Is there a way I can trim down on these expenses?

As internet technologies advance and people come up with more clever ways to take advantage of them, the Desktop computer becomes less a place of running applications and storing info, and becomes a tool to simply access the internet. More companies are recognizing this transition and are adapting their business models accordingly. How does this help me?

Enter Virtual Hosts.
While I need a workstation to make any use of my data, I can certainly pass the burden of paying electric bills, backing up data, and managing servers to someone else. And what’s best, I can access my information from anywhere that has an internet connection.

In a follow-up article I’ll be exploring the costs benefits of using Virtual Data Storage hosts compared to running my own computers and managing my own data. In the mean time, here are some helpful resources for those of you who like to dig deeper. And of course, my plug for Dreamhost:

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Virtual Storage Methods
Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Microsoft LiveDrive (In Progress TBA)
Google GDrive (In Progress - 2007)