Backblaze Custom Storage Servers

[»Blocks]

Some of you here might be interested in this blog post from Backblaze, an online storage company. I thought it was a pretty interesting read.

 

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

[»doc flabby]

I wonder how they backup the data

[»LtNirvana]

That design made me slightly erect.

[Testtube]

That was very interesting thanks.

[»Ceiu]

Not a bad setup, though the quality of the drives worries me a bit. Knowing someone who works for Seagate and who straight up says that the difference in quality and longevity between the consumer level and enterprise level drives is massive (and also slightly evident by the longer warranty on the enterprise drives). Going by newegg prices, for another $1800 and a loss of 22.5 TB, you can get the ES.2 drives which will last significantly longer and are designed to be in 24/7, high-activity environments.

[Dr Brain]

The chances of enough drives failing at once to actually lose data is vanishingly small, and space is more important to their business than individual drive reliability.