Amazon leaves Snowcone data migration boxes and older Snowball edge kit out to melt

Amazon Web Services is pulling the plug on its Snowcone data migration devices and will sunset all but the latest crop of its Snowball edge appliances. If you're not familiar, Snowcone was essentially a small, ruggedized network attached storage (NAS) device measuring 9x6x3 inches in size. It was shipped to customers who could …

[BartyFartsLast]

Nice gadget?

I'm always mildly upset when nice sounding bits of hardware like this "stop working" because the owners withdraw a service, I'm guessing there won't be huge numbers of them in the wild but it will be interesting to see if any escape and are revived

[John Riddoch]

Re: Nice gadget?

These devices were never intended to stay in use in the long term. They're shipped out to a customer to load on data to transfer into AWS where that transfer is faster than going over the internet (see also: station wagon full of DLT tapes). They shouldn't stay on prem for longer than it takes to load it up with the data going into AWS.

As for re-use, they're essentially relatively fancy encrypted hard drives with a NAS front end. There's probably limited value in re-use, although the ruggedisation might make them interesting in niche cases.