Top Ten Blog Posts of 2021 & All Time

It’s that time of year again—our annual roundup of the best of our blog. As 2021 comes to a close and we all get ready to celebrate the start of a new year, we wanted to take a moment to look back at the posts that you, our readers, loved the most.

We looked at the data from this year and sorted out the top 10 blog posts we published in 2021 by unique views. If you’re an avid reader of our blog, you might not be surprised that these posts made it to the top ten, but you might enjoy the trip down memory lane. And if you’re curious about our top blog posts of all time, we’ve listed those, too. Read on to see which posts made it to the top of the Backblaze blog.

Top Blog Posts of 2021

1. 1. “Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2021.” You know them, you love them—it’s our quarterly Drive Stats data. The information from our first quarterly report of the year made it to the very top of the list with all the excitement of seeing how the drives in our data centers have been faring.
   2. “Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2021.” Following in a close second is our second Drive Stats report of 2021, with even more data on the lifetime hard drive failure rates of our HDD and SSD boot drives.

1. 1. “Are SSDs Really More Reliable Than Hard Drives?” Do SSDs really fail less often than HDDs? We took a look at this common question in response to our Drive Stats to see if the failure rate data could offer a definitive response. Turns out you were curious, too.
   2. “The Next Backblaze Storage Pod.” A lot has changed since we first open-sourced the designs for our Storage Pods, so we shared the steps for our thought process on building the next generation of our storage servers. Pod posts are a perennial powerhouse, and this year was no different.
   3. “Hold On, Back Up: This Is How to Save Your TikToks.” Here at Backblaze, we’re on the cutting edge of cloud storage and the latest social trends, plus we’re all about being proactive about protecting data, especially considering data loss can happen with social media apps at any moment. This guide walks you through downloading TikTok videos and making sure they’re backed up to the cloud.
   4. “Chia Analysis: To Farm, or Not to Farm?” With the arrival of Chia, and after we open-sourced software to store Chia plots, we wondered if farming Chia was right for our business. We shared the analysis and what we learned from proving out if it was right for us.

1. “Easy Storage + Easy Provisioning: Backblaze Is Now a Terraform Provider.” In this post, we announced that Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is a provider in the Terraform registry, which means that developers can provision and manage B2 Cloud Storage resources directly from a Terraform configuration file.
2. “NAS 101: A Buyer’s Guide to the Features and Capacity You Need.” Network attached storage (NAS) allows you to easily store and manage data, but if it’s your first time buying a NAS device or you’re looking to upgrade your setup, the number of options can be overwhelming. This guide aims at making that process easier.
3. “A Cloud Storage Experiment to Level Up Chia Farming.” As a precursor to our post sharing the analysis about whether Backblaze would choose to farm Chia, we open-sourced an experimental solution to store Chia plots on Backblaze B2. How’d it go? Read on!
4. “Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2021.” It’s no surprise to see the Q3 Hard Drive Stats make it to this list, rounding out the top 10, and you can check out all of the data we’ve published over the years here.

Top Blog Posts of All Time

After looking at the top 10 blog posts of 2021, we felt like some of our most popular blog posts of all time deserved some end-of-year attention as well. You may know them well. They’re the posts you return to year after year. And if you don’t know them well, we’ve rounded them up here for you to bookmark for the next time you’re wondering how to wipe a hard drive or recover from a ransomware attack.

1. 1. “Guide to How to Wipe a Mac or Macbook Clean.” If you’re looking to upgrade your Mac or replace its drive, it’s important to make sure your data is backed up and securely erased before you toss out your old computer or pass it on to someone else. (Oh, and we have one for PCs as well.)
   2. “SSD 101: How to Upgrade Your Computer With an SSD.” An SSD can boost performance in a computer, especially if you’re replacing a hard drive with an SSD. This guide walks through the process of upgrading your computer with an SSD.
   3. “What’s the Diff: RAM vs. Storage.” People often use memory and storage interchangeably, but RAM and storage affect your computer’s performance in different ways. This post explains the difference.
   4. “SSD 101: How Reliable Are SSDs?” All drives fail, but how do we know if SSDs fail more often than HDDs? In this post we take a deep dive into SSD reliability factors.
   5. “What’s the Diff: Programs, Processes, and Threads.” If your computer is running slowly, knowing the difference between programs, processes, and threads can help you troubleshoot performance issues. We clarify the difference between the terms and describe the disadvantages and advantages of processes vs. threads.
   6. “Guide to How to Recover and Prevent a Ransomware Attack.” Ransomware attacks are on the rise, so it’s more important than ever to make sure you’re protected against a potential cyber security threat and know how to recover from one.

1. “What’s the Diff: VMs vs. Containers.” Both VMs and containers can help get the most out of available hardware and software resources. We explain the differences between them and the best uses for both virtualization technologies.
2. “Hard Disk Drive (HDD) vs. Solid-state Drive (SSD): What’s the Diff?” We spend a lot of time thinking about drives, so we put together this guide on the two drive types we receive the most questions about.
3. “Hard Drive Cost Per Gigabyte.” This post from 2017 provides our own purchase data to explain the hard drive pricing curve from 2009 to 2017.
4. “What’s the Diff: NAS vs. SAN.” A NAS device and a storage area network (SAN) are two different ways to store data—this guide helps clarify which is right for you and the pros and cons of either choice.

Thanks for Reading the Backblaze Blog in 2021

It’s been another great year of writing about cloud storage, entrepreneurship, how to back up data, and more. We want to thank you for joining us on the blog and sharing your thoughts in the comments. Did you have a favorite post that didn’t make it to either of these lists? We’d love to hear from you below!