AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.
via AWS Import/Export.
This is an interesting development for folks who need to move really large amounts of data on or off of the cloud. According to a table in the article the cost of shipping the drive and having Amazon do the transfer at the data center becomes cost effective when dealing with data amounts over 1TB being pushed over a 10Mbps connection. That is a lot of data[1].
The service will accept eSATA, USB2.0, and internal SATA drives and transfer your data to an S3 bucket or an EBS Snapshot.
[1]For reference, a single copy of all the data on CALI’s public servers (lessons, court opinions, podcasts, conference video, as so on) weighs in at just over a 1TB.