Amazon’s Snowmobile Is Literally A Hard Drive On Wheels

Thanks to internet speeds these days, downloading and transferring files in the gigabyte range isn’t too bad. Sending photos are also more or less instant because that’s how fast things move these days. However when it comes to backing up company data, especially if you’re a huge company that deals with terabytes or even petabytes worth of data, that’s a different story.

Now obviously you could use the internet to send these files into the cloud and into backup servers, but this would be pretty inefficient as it would take ages. This is when Amazon has the solution for their customers in the form of the Amazon Snowmobile, a truck that is basically a massive hard drive on wheels.

Each truck is capable of storing as much as 100 petabytes, which in case you’re unfamiliar equates to about 100,000 terabytes, which breaking it down even further is roughly 100 million gigabytes. The idea behind it is that customers can hire the trucks to manually copy their backup onto them, and the trucks will drive back to Amazon and transfer it onto their servers for safekeeping. Amazon says that they are charging $0.005 per gigabyte.

It’s an interesting and unique idea, although it seems that with it being a physical truck, it could be prone to damage which means that it could get into accidents, or it could even be hijacked with all your data on board. However Amazon claims that the truck has GPS, alarms, and 24/7 video surveillance. Customers even have the option of hiring a security escort if they deem that it is necessary.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General, Transportation
Tags: Amazon