Cloud vs On-Prem Storage Cost

Find the month a NAS stops costing more than a cloud subscription.

What you provide

A four-bay NAS with spinning disks idles around 30 to 50 W.

Result

The NAS pays for itself after 38 months

Over five years the box costs $2,226 against $2,880 for the subscription. Cost is only half of the decision. A NAS in your house is not an offsite backup: a fire, a flood or a theft takes the original and the copy together, and so does ransomware that reaches a mapped drive. The arrangement most people end up wanting is the box for fast local restores and a cheap cloud tier for the copy that lives somewhere else.

Diagnostic telemetry
NAS up frontEnclosure plus 4 drives
$1,100
NAS running costElectricity plus drive replacement set aside
$18.77 / month
Cloud8 TB at $6.00 per TB
$48.00 / month
Break-even
38 months
Five years, NAS
$2,226
Five years, cloud
$2,880

What this cannot tell you

  • Cost arithmetic on the figures you enter. It does not check any provider price list and it cannot know what your data is worth.
  • It compares money, not safety. A box in your house and a copy in a data centre survive completely different disasters, and that difference is usually more important than the break-even month.

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Cloud vs On-Prem Storage Cost on RunTheTests — free browser-based sysadmin tools, no sign-up.