There are a lot of great reasons to use the cloud for storage; anywhere, anytime, any-device access to your information is a great advantage for those of us not chained to a desk(top). But there are so many different services, how could anyone know which one to pick?

I’ve gone through a lot of the offerings out there and made some attempt to categorize them into business or consumer. Then I weeded out the fly-by-night file sharing sites which are more of a way to pirate music than store it. Then I scoured the web for reviews of the sites (it might have taken less time to review some of these myself) and again eliminated a bunch of services that had widespread complaints.

One aspect of cloud storage that I find particularly interesting is the commoditization of hardware, software, and the services built on top of them. Because the prices on the hardware and the bandwidth have come down so much in the past 5 years (it would have been unthinkable to save music on some server out there on the Internet 10 years ago), the cloud storage market has grown dramatically.

This commoditization makes sense if you think about it. Hard drives themselves have decreased in price to where you could get a terabyte SATA drive for $70. Granted, we’re talking about much larger scale than a single drive, but you could buy a 3u rack mountable server with 24 multi-terabyte drives in it for under $6,000. I remember that on my first server I installed a 100 MB (MB, not GB!) drive for $1500, plus we needed 2 to run RAID 0. Just looking at those numbers, it’s easy to see how the hardware commoditization has driven down the price of cloud storage.

In order to test my theory, I spoke with Brent Miller of ZT Systems, a reputable commodity server manufacturer. I shared my theory with Brent and asked him what he thought of it. His immediate response was, “You just might be right. For a long time everyone was talking about using the cloud for processing large volumes of data. Lately, we’re seeing a lot of action around cloud storage. One of our most popular build outs is a 2u storage server packed with 2 SSDs and 24 hard drives.”

So, I wasn’t that far off with my theory. I thought the most popular configuration would be a 3u server, but I’m off by a u!