Nowadays storage system market shows a good tendency of growth. According to Statista, the global enterprise storage systems market doubled from 5.6 billion U.S. dollars (in second quarter of 2009) to 13.6 billion U.S. dollars (in the fourth quarter of 2017). The most well known giants of data storage market are Google Drive, Dropbox and Amazon S3. Dropbox claims 300 million users on their site as of May 2014. Google Drive has 240 million users as of September 2014 (based on Thenextweb).
We present the first part of Memority’s functionality analysis, explaining three advantages that a data owner gets when using the platform. Memority platform is compared with the most popular centralized data storages — Google Drive, Dropbox and Amazon S3. Comparison will follow the next required characteristics: storage decentralization, creation of several file copies in independent storage and high payments to hosters for providing space for users files storage.
Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive — storages are centralized. If you use centralized servers, based on which traditional cloud storages work, then your files and files of other users are stored in one specific place, which increases the probability of their loss, removal, modification or viewing by third parties. The Memority storage system is a collection of independent repositories from around the world, including not only specialized hosting providers, but also computers of ordinary users.
Dropbox, Google Drive — do not create copies of files. Amazon S3 — can create copies of files, but does not guarantee this. Storing only one copy of the file increases the risk of losing the stored data. A decentralized storage system consisting of potentially unreliable host computers has a high risk of data loss or removal if the file is stored in a single instance. The Memority system stores several copies of data (10 by default) on unrelated storages.
Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive — have only a few independent storage units. If there are problems on any of them, files or access to them disappear for many (sometimes most) users. Not attractive for hosters. A small number of active hosters leads to an increase in the level of centralization. This increases the risk of access to copies by third parties and reduces the level of security of storage. The Memority’s mechanism of hosters motivation is aimed at connecting as many computers as possible to maximize the number of independent repositories.
To sum up all this information, storage decentralization is a unique feature of Memority platform. Only Memority has a large number of independent hosters in the network due to the mechanism of hosters motivation.
