I wonder about this, too. Since access latency is the primary concern, a neat solution would be to create some dynamic "fastup" storage scheme. For large file

I wonder about this, too. Since access latency is the primary concern, a neat solution would be to create some dynamic "fastup" storage scheme. For large files, loosen the always-on requirement; to fulfill a request the first N bytes are served from the always-on pod, and the tail is stored and served from pods that dynamically power up drives only at access time. The size of N is computed such that the IO time it takes to make it through the fragment stored on the always-on pod is > the power-on time for the pods where the tail is stored.