It’s not breaking news, but after a week off, I have been getting caught up and it seems every other article I’ve read has been related to Amazon’s Cloud Drive for music.
The Amazon announcement intrigued me though because of the convenience factor. The ability to purchase music, store it on my own personal drive in the cloud, and access it from nearly anywhere. That did catch my attention, so I read more into it.
The more I read, the more I found that it’s not for me. Why?
I am not about to change platforms again. I did when I moved from Windows Media to iTunes, and that did not go as smooth as I would have liked…it took some time. But, now I have all of my music in one location. Yes, I have to sync multiple devices, but that’s okay. I like to change up the variety on my iPhone and iPod, as does my wife and kids. The Amazon solution offers the convenience of variety, but at a price. I have over 100GB of music, and for me to move it to the cloud, it would cost me $100.00 per year to start. Add to that a new phone (Android), a new MP3 player, and time and I get a bit discouraged, especially when I can add up to 2TB of storage to my 1TB GoFlex Home NAS for under $100.00 and access it via my own personal cloud using Seagateshare.com. Maybe, I’m just set in my ways, but when it comes to technology, I would argue that most of us are. We use technology how we want to use it, how we are most comfortable using it. This is too much of a change for me to jump in head first.
Don’t get me wrong, this is awesome technology and a great service that Amazon is offering. Perhaps this solution is not meant for me in the first place. I would guess this is in response to existing Amazon MP3 customers’ requests, and not of devout locally stored iTunes music users. I just wonder where my head will be when Apple launches their version of iTunes in the cloud. Will I be singing the same tune?
What’s your take on this?
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So far, GoFlex Home exceeds my expectations
I agree Mark. First reaction: wow! This is going to change everything! Second reaction: I’m not going to buy it.
I was excited as well, then I saw the price it would cost me to store my 300GB + iTunes library. I have a pretty large amount of full albums that would need to be stored up there, and their pricing is just not going to cut it.
I’m happy with my ReadyNAS NV+ that has (4) Seagate 1.5TB drives in a RAID 5, so while I’m safe from a hard drive failure, I’m not safe from a house fire/flood/tornado/theft etc…thats what the cloud is good for.
The pricing needs to come down for me to want to join the masses, we’ll see.
The other issue with “cloud” is how fast/long will it take to upload your big libraries? And how will the performance be when using them on devices?
@Chris McCord Hey Chris – thanks for the comments…all good stuff, and good to know I am not alone 🙂
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