How much does operating temperature affect the failure rates of disk drives? Not much. The unlimited online backup service provided by Backblaze requires a lot of storage. In fact, we recently passed the 100-petabyte mark in our data center. This means we use disk drives. A lot of disk drives. The Backblaze Storage Pod is….
My last two blog posts were about expected drive lifetimes and drive reliability. These posts were an outgrowth of the careful work that we’ve done at Backblaze to find the most cost-effective disk drives. Running a truly unlimited online backup service for only $5 per month means our cloud storage needs to be very efficient and we need to quickly figure out which drives work.
Last month I dug into drive failure rates based on the 25,000+ consumer drives we have and found that consumer drives actually performed quite well. Over 100,000 people read that blog post and one of the most common questions asked was: “Ok, so the consumer drives don’t fail that often. But aren’t enterprise drives so….
How long do disk drives last? The short answer is: we don’t know yet, but it’s longer than you might guess. Why does a company that keeps more than 25,000 disk drives spinning all the time not know how long they last? Backblaze has been providing reliable and unlimited online backup for over five years…..
New ultrabook design decisions limit data recovery options When my girlfriend recently dropped (and killed) her new ultrabook, I found out the Solid State Drive (SSD) inside of it was not easily removable like the old hard drives always were. This means a dead laptop = completely lost data if you aren’t fully backed up…..
What do Google providing search, Coca-Cola operating its systems to track inventory, and Backblaze backing up your data have in common? The computers that handle all of this live in data centers. And those data centers use power – lots of it. In the U.S. alone there are over 20,000 data centers – each of….
Don Honabach has the honor of being the first person to successfully build his own Backblaze storage pod. (At least the first we know about.) With four servers running at home for media storage, Don, was using a fair bit of power (and probably generating a lot of heat and noise and taking up space.)….
Last month’s blog post about building our Backblaze storage pods generated a ton of interest and many people are building their own pods! Our post also generated a ton of questions so below we answer the common ones and provides more detail about where to get components.
