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Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

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Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#31

Post by corobo »

atYevP wrote: post #13
buro9 wrote: post #7

@atYevP how much does the Backblaze business plan cost? Or rather, if I have 10TB on a NAS and a Linux machine, what would it cost to back that up to Backblaze as a consumer given that you don't support this and I'd need to purchase the business thing?

Hey there! The business and consumer computer backup service have the same feature-set, so our business service would also not work with a NAS or Linux box. I'd recommend looking in to Backblaze B2. It'll be a bit more expensive as it's $0.005/GB but you'll have more control over your backups and lots of integrators make it easy.

Is Linux backup support anywhere on the radar at all?

I recently trimmed down my Backblaze licenses after switching to Linux installs, just went with s3 as s3cmd had a path of least resistance to storing backups. Would love to switch back if it's ever possible :)

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#32

Post by linsomniac »

I've watched Backblaze closely, and I love their detailed reports of drive stats. I've always been curious about their choices of manufacturers though. In my past I found that Hitachi/HGST drives were far more reliable than others. We had a couple people doing hardware and software support on ~120 machines, and hard drive replacements were expensive (in man-hours) for us, so whenever possible we got Hitachi drives.

The Backblaze numbers seem to support this as well, far fewer failures of HGST drives vs Seagate, but they seem to buy mostly Seagate. I guess when you have tens of thousands of drives, you're always going to need to be replacing them. So maybe a 10x reduction in failures isn't worth it? Or maybe they just couldn't get HGST drives in quantity?

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#33

Post by cyberpunk0 »

linsomniac wrote: post #32

I've watched Backblaze closely, and I love their detailed reports of drive stats. I've always been curious about their choices of manufacturers though. In my past I found that Hitachi/HGST drives were far more reliable than others. We had a couple people doing hardware and software support on ~120 machines, and hard drive replacements were expensive (in man-hours) for us, so whenever possible we got Hitachi drives. T…

I've never had a Seagate drive last any reasonable amount of time

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#34

Post by godzillabrennus »

I’ve been a customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%.

I chatted with support and they said this is normal. That progress may jump to completed any time because the restore only tracks file count.

I wish I could say I’m happy about this but I’m four days into trying to pull down my data and I still have no idea when I’ll be able to start the download.

This sucks.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#35

Post by ksec »

chiph wrote: post #11
tooltalk wrote: post #8

wonder if Backblaze is buying directly from HDD manufacturers or wholesalers and how much volume discount?

They've talked about this before -- despite orders like this, they're still not a big enough customer to be on the manufacturer's radar. So they're ordering from a middle-man. Back during the hard-drive crisis after the tidal wave that disrupted production ... they were buying from anyone that had drives to sell, including people going into their local big-box store to source drives.

Still? 100PB of HDD is still not big Enough?

So the question would be, In unit of Backblaze, what are the size for Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook?

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#36

Post by niftich »

chiph wrote: post #11
tooltalk wrote: post #8

wonder if Backblaze is buying directly from HDD manufacturers or wholesalers and how much volume discount?

They've talked about this before -- despite orders like this, they're still not a big enough customer to be on the manufacturer's radar. So they're ordering from a middle-man. Back during the hard-drive crisis after the tidal wave that disrupted production ... they were buying from anyone that had drives to sell, including people going into their local big-box store to source drives.

Link to their blog post on mad dashes to Costco after the floods [1]. It's an engaging read.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#37

Post by teach »

xhrpost wrote: post #27

I imagine you'll have to reduce pricing on Backblaze B2 eventually in order to stay competitive. What's it like having to flip such a massive switch where your revenue is X one minute and then X - 20% the next?

I don't understand. B2 is currently about half the cost of S3 for outbound data and 1/4 the cost for data at rest.

What do you mean "stay competitive?"

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#38

Post by monochromatic »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #34

I’ve been a customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%. I chatted with support and they said this is normal. That progress may jump to completed any time because the restore only tracks file count. I wish I could say I…

Why would it take any time at all to "create a restore"?

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#39

Post by amelius »

atYevP wrote: post #21
amelius wrote: post #15

Do you keep them powered on at all times? Does a storage pod include a software-switch to turn them off selectively?

Yev from Backblaze here -> Yes, unless the storage pod is in maintenance, it remains on so that backup and B2 data can be uploaded and accessed.

Interesting. Have you ever computed how much power you would save if you turned them off when not needed?

Or is every pod constantly in use? Would it help if smart algorithms repartition the data on storage pods, to optimize power use?

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#40

Post by mshook »

ericfrederich wrote: post #20

I love the articles from Backblaze. I enjoy them publishing the failure rates of drives and anything else on the blog. Two things missing from them in my opinion 1) a Linux client and 2) a second location I guess I could get away without a Linux client if there was an unRAID plugin for B2.

Regarding 1): rclone does the job. That's what I use with B2.

https://rclone.org/

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