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The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

backblaze.com

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Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to be super confused by this. The blog post says, as you quote: > we made it clear that customers can serve video and other large files using the CDN so long as that content is hosted by a Cloudflare service like Stream, Images, or R2. But when I click through to the specific CDN terms it still says: > Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Plat…

Yea.. the blog post and the terms don't exactly align. Looking at the Terms only, they say "specific Paid Services" and in the Developer Platform Terms, further say > The Cloudflare Developer Platform consists of the following Services: (i) Cloudflare Workers, a Service that permits developers to deploy and run encapsulated versions of their proprietary software source code (each a “Workers Script”) on Cloudflare’s e…

> they specifically call out products which can be used to serve non-html content as part of the Dev Plat, and Workers is not one of them.

Ah, but R2 is! My specific question was about whether I could serve video from R2 via the CDN... it sounds like yes, probably? They have not really succeeded in making their terms totally transparent here.

I actually have no opinion on how/if workers are involved...

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been publishing these stats for years and years now, too. It's a wealth of data they've provided and has helped me pick the dozens of drives I've ordered over the years

Where are you ordering your drives from these days? In the past I went from physical shops -> new egg -> amazon and now amazon and new egg aren't reliable sellers and the physical shops are either gone, under-stocked, or buy their stuff on amazon too.

B&H is usually a safe choice. Newegg and Amazon can be too if you're careful with who the seller is. Drives for work often get placed through an enterprise wholesaler like CDW or MARKIT.

For my personal NAS projects, I generally buy a WD MyBook/EasyStore from Best Buy and shuck the drive. The drive on the inside is generally a WD White Label, which is a WD Red (NAS drive) that didn't meet QA specs. I wouldn't rely on them for mission critical stuff, but they're perfect for a Plex server and you can generally get them cheap. (worth noting that I've seen a few say they've been removing the SATA connections from these recently and I haven't bought one in about 15 months so do some research before purchasing)

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#133
post #29

I use B2 as the backend for my personal backups using restic (which I would highly recommend https://github.com/restic/restic ). I don't have a ton of data to backup, so even with hourly backups (restic only backs up when there are changes) I have ~100GB and it runs me a whopping $0.60/month. I almost feel guilty when I get the bill. But the minute I need to pick a storage platform in a professional context I know wh…

Yev from Backblaze here -> It's all good and we love you being a happy customer! If you want to buy a backup license, feel free ;-)

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#134
post #34

We're so lucky that Backblaze creates these reports and shares them openly. That's not normal for companies to do and it's valuable for us consumers to get these insights. Actually I'm referring to their drive stats and not their storage pod stats like in this report. Thank you Backblaze.

Yev from Backblaze here -> We love creating these and it's a team effort internally which a bunch of departments like to help with. Also appreciate the kudos and we share it with the org as well. You keep reading it and we'll keep making it! :)

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#136
post #40

Yeah yeah. Just make your client software suck less. Crashplan is much better but went professional only, sadly.

Yev from Backblaze here -> I'm heading up the Computer Backup product, what would you like to see changed or updated? I can make sure to send it to the product team! Or you can fill out our product suggestion portal -> https://www.backblaze.com/product-portal.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#137
post #12
post #10

If there is one company that could give accurate stats on what drives actually perform better and what drives are the worst and fail more often it is Black Blaze, but yet they don't. What a missed opportunity to provide some insight.

No.... I take it back, I am a fool! They do publish the stats!! https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-... My bad!!

Yev from Backblaze here -> Mwahaha :D I was going to post a link but you found it :)

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#138

Pricing can be funny! Total Data Stored Monthly Downloads Cost 1TB 1000TB $119,712/yr 1000TB 1000TB $72,000/yr What is the cheapest TDS for a given 1000TB monthly downloads? Seems to be: 334TB 1000TB $24,048/yr So there are situations where uploading dummy files that pad with zeros will reduce your bill. --- Edit: The 334 now seems obvious when you consider: * Egress is $10/TB * Store is $6/TB Free Egress is 3x month…

From the very top, this is great analysis. I wonder if they are willing to strike a deal if you need relatively high egress, but very low storage. Also, I do expect that Backblaze's lifetime egress costs per drive far exceed the TCO for the drive (minus egress). Zero trolling: It would great to see some commentary directly from Backblaze on this matter -- for example, explain that egress is very expensive. EDIT Above…

Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.

Pulling the egress costs from the hyperscalers' storage pricing pages:

* Amazon S3 ranges from $50-$90/TB depending on monthly volume.

* Google Cloud Storage ranges from $80-$230/TB depending on monthly volume and where you're transferring data to/from.

* Azure Blob Storage ranges from $40-$181/TB (with the First 100GB/month free) depending on monthly volume and whether you route data via the Microsoft Premium Global Network.

Cloudflare published a blog post a couple of years ago explaining just how much money AWS makes on egress - customers are paying up to 80x Amazon's costs: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress

> I wonder if they are willing to strike a deal if you need relatively high egress, but very low storage.

It depends on what "very low" means. We have a capacity-based pricing option, Backblaze B2 Reserve, starting at 20 TB, that includes all egress and transaction fees.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#139
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah turns out S3 is expensive because all those 9s cost $$$

Also the cool features around deletion prevention, automatic lifecycle management.

Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.

Backblaze B2 does include deletion prevention (object lock) and lifecycle management to automatically hide (soft delete) or (hard) delete objects according to a schedule.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#140

Recently got a Synology and have been considering cloud backup needs. Mine would roughly be a terabyte, and so far my thinking is shaking out as: For incrementally backing up laptop data, the process needs to run on my laptop anyway, so I may as well just use Arq. For NAS data that changes frequently enough to desire incrementals, choose Synology Hyperbackup. For NAS data that doesn't change frequently and can just b…

Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.

> I heard that Backblaze occasionally has weird gotchas that surprise people, like auto-deleting files from your backups that you delete locally, so I just feel cautious.

We have two similar products, and it's easy to mix them up. To clarify:

Backblaze Computer Backup (a different product from Backblaze B2) deletes old versions of files from your backup either 30 days or 1 year (you choose which) after you delete them locally. You also have the option to enable "Forever Version History", which costs $6/TB per month once your files age out of the backup.

Backblaze B2 (S3-compatible cloud object storage) will never delete anything unless you tell it to do so, either via the API or a lifecycle rule.

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