Free Cloud Storage from Hitachi!

This is an addendum to the prior post on rebuilding my home server. But don’t worry it’s much shorter. I was just amused by the offer that came with the Hitachi 2TB hard I picked up.  The text in the photo is a bit small (unless you click for the large version), but it reads “Get 3GB free at hitachibackup.com”.  The fine print at the bottom says you can get 250GB of storage for just $49/year. And free apps!

So to be clear, Hitach is selling you a 2 terabyte drive.  That’s 2,000,000,000,000 bytes (since it favors the storage industry not to say 1K =1024).  This is a hard drive in retail packaging that is almost always going to be used in addition to the main drive that your system will typically come with.  They are generously offering to store 3,000,000,000 of those bytes for free – a whopping 0.15% of the drive. That’s like selling a Porsche and including a coupon for a 355ml can of gas. Now, 250GB for $49/year is actually not at all unreasonable – but I think I’d rather go with a cloud storage provider like Google Drive, Windows Live Mesh, or Dropbox that’s actually focused on this!