No? No. No!
I disagree with pretty much everything here. Allow me to make some points:
I want SSD storage on everything. It's nice and fast, it seems to crash less, it's small, I can do large-scale stuff without worrying about bottlenecks. It's really expensive. Sometimes I have a cause for large datasets, and I don't have the budget to put tons of stuff on SSD.
<blockquote>Imagine phoning your supplier: “Hi, I’d like to buy some really slow storage, please, to augment my nice fast stuff”. “Certainly sir”, they’d reply. “How bad do you want it?”.</blockquote>
Imagine phoning your supplier: “Hi, I’d like to buy some backup tapes, please, to augment my nice fast storage in case someone breaks it”. “Certainly sir”, they’d reply. “We ship those all the time. When do you want it?”. That's really slow storage. Yet, people use it. Why? They use it because it's economical. You don't need to read backups every day unless something's very wrong, so you don't care that it can take a minute.
<blockquote>You wouldn’t buy slow storage, so why compromise performance by hanging on to old non-performant disk?</blockquote>
I have slow storage. I don't need to buy it. I probably won't go out and buy a ton of deliberately slow storage, because I have to pay for that. I might as well pay for something that will last longer. But now that I purchased some disks for, let's say, $1000, I have them. I could probably get the same disks for $500 now, but if I need to store some data on the disks, the cost for using the current disks is $0. I hear your article shouting at me that these disks aren't free. Yes, they are. My costs are power (disks versus servers, the power is not a problem), cooling (the same), risk of failure (true, but I keep backups and new disks can fail too), and empty slots in my servers (my disks aren't 74gb ones. I have enough hard drive bays).
But now you want me to replace cheap or free slow disk with cloud storage. Why? I don't want cloud storage. Maybe if I have to put data into somewhere so that people from lots of places can get it. That's a case for cloud. Maybe it's part of an off-site solution; that's also a case for cloud. But not for speed or cost. I have to pay for cloud storage by the month. If I'm using it to store large data, the kind I'd be putting on slow disk, I have to pay a lot every month. Not to mention that now I have to pay for bandwidth to put it there and bring it back, which is very much not free--even if I am on a connection devoid of ISP annoyance, I'm affecting everyone else by putting so much traffic on the line. I also have to worry about security--if I'm paying the cloud provider, I'm going to make sure they don't inspect my data, but there's always someone else. I encrypt as much as I can, but that's one more headache I can have if I'm using different systems. I assume you also planned on my making backups of this cloud data just in case the cloud provider has a terrible problem and loses it? I wonder what you expected me to use to back the stuff up to? A cabinet full of reserve SSDs that I only use for that? No thank you.
My stack of old disks is free, because I'm done with the days where people would ask me why I have so much old junk on my desk. I can use them for storage purposes. If they break, I try to get something new to replace them. If I can, an SSD. One of those gigantic samsung ones, please. If that won't work and I need to store a large amount of data, I'll go to my disk cabinet, find an appropriately sized disk, and shove it in. True, it'll be slower, but it allows me to take my finite budget for storage and decide what system deserves the limited number of fast drives I can get, and which systems will have to make do with perfectly functional slow disk. Mending is better than spending--both I and the finance department agree.