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Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

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Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#201
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What order of magnitude? There are 60 drive chassis in 4U you can get[0][1], but even a 4TB -> 6TB drive + 15 more drives isn't exactly an order of magnitude. And they have 2 10GiB ports, though I'm sure you can work with them and get more.. It's disingenuous to call this not "state of the art" when it's really quite close, and obviously is meeting a backblaze design goal. [0]: http://www.newisys.com/Products/4600.sh…

What order of magnitude? Well, this article describes storage pods with 180TB of storage. HGST have a 10TB hard drive measuring 26.1mm * 101.6mm * 147mm [1] and a 4U chassis measures 178mm * 437mm * 521mm [2] If you had 4U of hard drives with no space for power, cooling, interconnect etc you cold fit 10 terabytes / (26.1mm * 101.6mm * 147mm) * (178mm * 437mm * 521mm) = 1.04 petabytes into 4U I don't know whether six…

> HGST have a 10TB hard drive

"Archive drive" => shingled writes. Are people really using these things for online workloads? Might make sense for Backblaze's original "write and forget" backup workload but not very well for B2 or Dropbox

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#202
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used BB for years on multiple machines and have been more than satisfied, in fact I recommend it to everyone. I'm not affiliated with them at all, just a happy customer. Confused as to why someone would find their service disappointing but to each their own.

it takes months to get everything backed up, and now the just the file lists or whatever is taking up 8GB+ on my disk (i use a smaller SSD as the primary drive so space is precious). I contacted support and their only solution is to create a new account and go through many more months of backing everything up again.

> it takes months to get everything backed up

What kind of internet connection are you on? I recently reinstalled my mac from scratch (El Capitan upgrade went haywire) and had to redo my backblaze backup. I uploaded the 500 GB to Backblaze in under 24 hours.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Details? I don't work for BB, but have worked in the backup industry for some time in my past, and always curious.

Not the OP, have used BB for 5 years (and still using, the service is totally fine): Initial sync is a nighmare. The upload is on the slow side. Biggest gripe so far is that I just cannot tell the client that some files are more important than the others. I would love my pdf invoices and changed KDBX files to be synced before uploading the uncompressed blu ray of Guardians of the galaxy. On the other hand there are p…

In my experience the Backblaze client uploads smaller files before bigger ones, in effect prioritising your documents over large video files or archives.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the situation I was talking about, yes. It's much cheaper to go into the datacenter once a month to replace failed data disks than to have to go in to promptly replace any system disk HDD that fails, in order to not have 60 idle disks.

Sure, that would make sense if they only had personnel in the datacenter once a month, but: "we replace about 10 drives every day" [1]. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...

To clarify, I'm not saying that they wouldn't be better off with an SSD boot drive. I'm arguing that having an HDD boot drive, given their setup, isn't awful.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#206
post #156
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You merely state that it's just not state of the art, and to come work at dropbox. That's about all I can do. However... > This is what I mean by being disingenuous. I'm don't think disingenuous is what I'm being. Maybe I'm not being as forthcoming as you'd like. Maybe my comment wasn't useful without details I'm not providing. But I'm not lying or misrepresenting anything. So let me try to be helpful without using…

up to an order of magnitude more 5x the density so half an order of magnitude, which is much more believable?

> 5x the density

> so half an order of magnitude

Almost 70% of an order of magnitude.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#207
post #43
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the marketing angle must be pretty big. Not only making people aware of your service, but convincing people to use it. A big question when selecting any online backup service is, "are these people I'm trusting with my data complete idiots?" Your posts should really help convince a lot of people that you are, in fact, not complete idiots. For what it's worth, I've been a happy customer for years and try to s…

We have gotten some other benefits as well. One of our senior support reps decided to join us after reading an IAmA where we talked about the Storage Pods. We just recently hired a senior sys admin and the head of Facebook's Prineville data center, both of whom were a result of reading our storage posts. Also, when we work with contract manufacturers on building storage pods, talk with data centers about space, etc.,…

The way you guys keep blogging, it's simply an enormous positive experience. I've been a vocal advocate of BackBlaze online and offline. Lots of even cheaper services come and go, but I keep relying and pointing to BackBlaze.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#208
post #111

I really love these, and I desperately wanted to be a Backblaze customer, but I was put off by the abysmal desktop software :( Storage execution seems top-notch. End-user software deserves some love.

Abysmal compared to what?

I have experience with the Mac client, and it's rock solid, and very well executed.

Re: Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Details? I don't work for BB, but have worked in the backup industry for some time in my past, and always curious.

takes forever, and now the file list takes 8GB+ of space - support says the only way to fix the problem is to create a new account and go through the months of backing everything up again

If your upload takes months, I'm not sure that _any_ online backup is right for you. I did a fresh install recently, and I've got 84 GB backed up. It took me a couple of days, and that's on a cheap ADSL line in The Netherlands.

In your case, I guess it would be much better to look at other solutions. For example if you have a Mac, get an extra Time Machine drive and put it at your employer's place. Every week, bring your laptop there and back it up.

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