111–120 of 165 posts
BackBlaze spent ~12 million dollars on 12TB Seagate drives (at full retail)
NOPE
I was just curious when I saw the # of drives as the largest chunk in this writeup - to see how much that chunk cost them.
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I suppose, but there’s no such thing as a single HDD that stores 100TB. The biggest you can get currently are (I believe) 14TB helium-filled drives.
My guess is they meant 10TB as it would be a more "equal" comparison: 1 10TB drive 10 1TB drives
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I'm not sure how that would be useful, since terabytes don't fail. When a drive fails, it's effectively a brick with no terabytes.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > When a drive fails, it's effectively a brick with no terabytes. Interesting factoid: that isn't always true. What you describe is actually the CLEANEST type of failure, the drive suddenly becomes a brick. We replace the drive and rebuild it from parity. A way more interesting failure is when disk blocks start going bad at an unacceptable rate. Backblaze splits your data across 20 di…
Do I understand correctly, that when the drive is half-failed, you don't just say "it will probably completely stop working in the near future" and discard/replace it but keep using it?
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Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup? Backblaze offers a "Backblaze Rapid Ingest Fireball" to allow you to ship us 60 TBytes of data on an appliance. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-backblazes-rapid-... If you only have 2 - 10 TBytes, I suggest you get a f…
> You might be surprised how easy and fast it is to upload a couple of TBytes nowadays. You might be surprised how slow it is in many areas of the US, let alone the world.
I know there are digital deserts. (I just made that name up.)
But one thing I'm curious about -> often when the only CONSUMER ISP in one area (like your DSL company) is slow, there are quietly companies in your area with Gigabits of connection. If you really live out in a remote area of Colorado this may be 30 miles away from your current location, but I would LOVE to see a real "heat map" of high speed connections in the USA.
I think an absolutely killer feature for a company like Kinkos would be to have a "rent a super fast internet connection for a couple days" so you could drive someplace, download a movie or upload your backup, then come home.
The Backblaze office in San Mateo California originally only had very sad DSL line available for consumers. We requested a 10 Gbit/sec symmetric fiber connection to our office, and it took a VERY ANNOYING 3 month wait, but eventually a commercial provider (AboveNet or whatever it is called now) brought it to us as long as we signed a 3 year contract. Totally without asking, AboveNet put a fiber line in where we can light it up at up to 100 Gbits on a single strand of fiber, and they put 40 fiber strands into our office!! This costs $1,500/month so not really viable for an individual home, but maybe for a Kinkos or local ISP or shared among 10 - 100 houses this may be viable.
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It's been over a year, can you please ask someone at backblaze to add a single line of code into the snapshots so you can leave a comment? Right now if you make a snapshot, the only info is the date and time. Not the data, what's in the snapshot, literally anything about it. Please!
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > please add ability to comment on snapshots Actually, very very quietly as part of the 6.0 release (4 days ago), we now allow you to "name your snapshot". While this is not a comment, and you can't change the name LATER (so useless to old snapshots), at least going forward you can put up to about 1,000 characters of description in the snapshot name.
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Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup? Backblaze offers a "Backblaze Rapid Ingest Fireball" to allow you to ship us 60 TBytes of data on an appliance. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-backblazes-rapid-... If you only have 2 - 10 TBytes, I suggest you get a f…
I have cable Internet with 20mbit/s upload which I believe is decent (unless you have fiber) means uploading 8 000 000 gigabits (=1 terabyte) would take 400 000 seconds, that's about five days and that's the theoretical maximum. At ten terabytes you are now looking at two months...
Backblaze "Best Practices" recommends you get fully backed up within 30 days, but honestly we won't be bothered and cut you off even if it takes 6 months to upload your whole backup. As long as you are aware of the exposure for the first two months (where only half your data is backed up), I still think this would be FINE for somebody with 10 TBytes.
If you do something like this, the only thing you have to know is Backblaze backs up files in "size order". Small files first. So maybe if your digital movies are more replaceable than your pictures, you might be through 5 TBytes of photos in the first month and be "protected enough" to live with?
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My experience, over decades, but now coming up on half that ago, was that IBM/Hitachi/HGST are definitely worth it. I used to run a small hosting business, which had hundreds of discs, and consulting business which had clients with hundreds more discs. Seagates, in general, could always be expected to fail in a 3 year span. Often multiple times. IBM/Hitachi/HGST, especially the UltraStar enterprise line, would basica…
> improper cooling You've had far more experience with this stuff than I have. I wonder what your view is on all these NAS RAID boxes and HDD longevity and heat. I personally never saw so many HDD failures until I started running them inside a small NAS I bought some years ago. I nicknamed it my "drive killer" because I was replacing the things so often. Other HDDs I have in other (non-NAS) machines sure seemed to la…
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> improper cooling You've had far more experience with this stuff than I have. I wonder what your view is on all these NAS RAID boxes and HDD longevity and heat. I personally never saw so many HDD failures until I started running them inside a small NAS I bought some years ago. I nicknamed it my "drive killer" because I was replacing the things so often. Other HDDs I have in other (non-NAS) machines sure seemed to la…
AFAIK Google have said they never really find any correlation between SMART errors and actual drive failures.
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"Seagates fail kind of a lot..." That Seagate 10 TB was the singular standout in terms of reliability. Maybe it is worth checking out.
If there's one thing I've learned from seeing these reports over the years, it's that the specific drive model matters more than the brand.