B2 for Beginners: Inside the B2 Web interface B2 Cloud Storage enables you to store data in the cloud at a fraction of what you’ll pay other services. For instance, we’re one-fourth of the price of Amazon’s S3. We’ve made it easy to access thanks to a web interface, API and command line interface. Let’s….
Backblaze has recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in our data centers since April 2013. At the end of 2016 we had 73,653 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,553 boot drives and 72,100 data drives. This post looks at the hard drive statistics of the data drives we monitor. We’ll first look at the stats for Q4 2016, then present the data for all of 2016, and finish with the lifetime statistics for all of the drives Backblaze has used in our cloud storage data centers since we started keeping track. Along the way we’ll share observations and insights on the data presented.
Lifecycle Rules enable the B2 service to automatically hide and/or delete older versions of files stored in B2. This capability is available for the Web GUI, CLI, and API. Lifecycle Rules are applied to some or all of the files in a B2 Bucket with each Bucket having its own Lifecycle Rules. Let’s take a….
No business wants to get caught off guard when disaster strikes. We look at five data storage disasters just waiting to happen to small to medium-sized businesses and how to avoid them.
In our last report for Q2 2016, we counted 68,813 spinning hard drives in operation. For Q3 2016 we have 67,642 drives, or 1,171 fewer hard drives. Stop, put down that Twitter account, Backblaze is not shrinking. In fact, we’re growing very nicely and are approaching 300 petabytes of data under our management. We have fewer drives because over the last quarter we swapped out more than 3,500 2 terabyte (TB) HGST and WDC hard drives for 2,400 8 TB Seagate drives. So we have fewer drives, but more data. Lots more data! We’ll get into the specifics a little later on, but first, let’s take a look at our Q3 2016 drive stats.
What if a hard drive could tell you it was going to fail before it actually did? Is that possible? Each day Backblaze records the SMART stats that are reported by the 67,814 hard drives we have spinning in our Sacramento data center. SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology and is a monitoring….
The question “How heavy is the Backblaze Cloud?” came up in a marketing meeting one Monday afternoon. “One million pounds,” someone guessed, “A hundred thousand pounds,” someone else said trying to sound sure. The truth is we had no idea. “Well, how much does a real cloud weigh?” someone else asked, and at that point….
Seagate just introduced a 60TB SSD. Wow. As Backblaze scurries about upgrading from 2TB to 8TB hard drives in our Storage Pods, we just have to stop for the moment and consider what a 3.6PB Storage Pod would look like and how much it would cost. Let’s dive in to the details… What we know….
