Amazon says “send us your hard drive and we’ll seed your cloud”

With hard drives growing growing faster than Internet bandwidth, users of online storage are facing a tricky issue: how to shift many hundreds of gigabytes, indeed upwards or a terrabyte, from their PC into the cloud?

Amazon Web Services, which operates Amazon’s S3 storage service, is trialling an ironically low-tech solution: send them your hard drive. Currently running in the US with a planned extension to Europe, AWS Import/Export lets customers load all their files onto an external hard drive with either a USB 2.0 or eSATA connection.

After creating a digital manifest report which details the name of the target S3 ‘bucket’, your AWS Access Key and a return shipping address, the drive is sent to Amazon and then forwarded to the S3 data centre to be uploaded directly onto their servers the next day. The drive is then sent back to the customer at Amazon’s expense.

Amazon says it will charge a US$80 per drive submitted plus an additional US$2.50 per hour for data loading, which will favour drive using the speedy eSATA interface over USB 2.0.

A blog post  announcing the service explains that “It is now relatively easy to create a collection of data so large that it cannot be uploaded to offsite storage in a reasonable amount of time. Media files, corporate backups, data collected from scientific experiments, and potential AWS Public Data Sets are now at this point.”

“Our customers in the scientific space routinely create terabyte data sets from individual experiments. Customers with AWS storage requirements at the terabyte and petabyte level often ask us if they can sidestep the Internet and simply send us a disk drive, or even a 747 full of such drives.”

Each individual file must be no larger than 5GB and files submitted can be encrypted. Amazon also stresses that  “all personnel involved in the process have undergone extensive background checks.”