iDrive, a privately held company with more than four million users and over 500 petabytes of data, is replacing its hard disk drives (HDD) with solid state drives (SSD) in a wholesale upgrade to its object storage service, e2. SSDs have several advantages over traditional hard disk drives, providing improved performance and reliability due to their lack of mechanical components and greater scalability. The cost of such an upgrade likely would have presented a major challenge to iDrive, but their efficient sourcing and commissioning allows the company to offer the increased storage capacity at the same cost they state “drop[s] the cost of tier one storage by 85% compared to AWS S3”.
iDrive customers will now be able to take advantage of their e2 service which is currently available in their Virginia storage region but will be expanded to fourteen locations worldwide. With greater global accessibility, customers of iDrive benefit from the improved resilience this enlarged network allows as Wasabi has a total of twelve locations and BackBlaze only four. The first year of service also offers a generous ninety percent discount with customers able to acquire a terabyte of storage for four dollars with no egress fees, though the cost doubles per TB per month thereafter. Finally, the company is also able to offer a free trial of e2 to its customers, providing seven days and one terabyte of storage.
Direct competitors of iDrive in this arena include Digital Ocean (opens in new tab), Bunny, Vultr, Rackspace, CloudFlare, IBM, Alibaba, Microsoft (opens in new tab), Oracle, Google (opens in new tab) and AWS (opens in new tab). These rivals have several differentiating features from the major players like Azure such as simpler pricing structures, egress fees and a lack of hidden charges. Additionally, many are able to offer a much faster ordering process allowing for up to a petabyte of storage to be bought in minutes.
In comparison to these competitors, hard disk drives are still a major force in the data center with their affordability being a major factor. Offering less than twenty dollars per terabyte, it is no surprise that ‘cloud backup services’ prefer this option to store data and services; newer drives such as the Seagate Ironwolf Pro being available for just under four hundred dollars for a whopping twenty-two terabytes. Such drives are not as advanced as their SSD counterparts, but are a fraction of the cost as enterprise grade SSDs costing over twelve thousand dollars for fifteen terabytes.
