{"id":111949,"date":"2025-02-13T09:05:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-13T17:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/?p=111949"},"modified":"2025-12-12T14:26:21","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T22:26:21","slug":"exabyte-scale-hard-drive-investments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/exabyte-scale-hard-drive-investments\/","title":{"rendered":"Exabyte Scale Hard Drive Investments"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
\"A<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\u00a0<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Not many companies run exabyte scale data platforms, and not many companies open source their drive data<\/a>\u2014at Backblaze, we do both. From that perch, I\u2019m sharing how I think about buying hard drives at exabyte scale, including the intentional design decisions and trade-offs I make as an expert in the field, and what you can apply to your own operations whether you\u2019re running a couple hundred terabytes or petabytes on-premises.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

TL\/DR: Bigger drives aren\u2019t always better<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

You\u2019d think, as a cloud platform managing massive amounts of data, we\u2019d be delighted that drive density continues to grow. But it\u2019s not as simple as that. While we do run cohorts of 20TB+ drives in our environment, there are a few reasons it doesn\u2019t always make sense to fill our servers up with the densest drives we can buy.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Drive size and IOPS starvation<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Drives have a finite amount of capacity to perform input\/output operations per second (IOPS). The larger the drive, the more those IOPS become a contentious consumable\u2014creating a triangle of tension between storage capacity, reading, and writing. You can store more data on a 20TB drive, but you can only read and write as fast as that one drive allows. Conversely, you can store the same amount of data on five 4TB drives and 5x your IOPS capacity through concurrency.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

For high demand workloads with high concurrency requirements for reading and writing files\u2014like AI infere<\/a>ncing<\/a>, for example\u2014you\u2019ll want to carefully consider the balance point between the right drive size and the performance you need to get out of the system. The ability to read, write, or delete content has to peacefully coexist with the ability for your storage infrastructure to service any of those three needs. Now, you might be thinking: If that\u2019s a constraint, what about SSDs? I\u2019ll get to that down below.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Drive size and rebuilds<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

When managing large data at scale we employ Reed-Solomon erasure coding<\/a> to rebuild drives upon failure to maintain data durability. The larger the drive, the more painful and slow the rebuild when that drive eventually fails. The rebuild process can take hours or even days, depending on the size of the drive and the workload on the system. That can impact performance, especially if the storage system is already under heavy use, and increases the risk of another failure while the rebuild is in progress. While we mitigate that risk in a variety of ways, it may not be feasible for smaller shops to do so.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

If you\u2019re in a business that relies on real-time data access\u2014financial institutions, healthcare providers, e-commerce platforms, for example\u2014you need drives that balance capacity and rebuild speed. Higher-capacity drives may offer better storage density but smaller or enterprise-grade drives with faster rebuild times and higher endurance may be a better choice for businesses where continuous uptime and\/or durability is critical.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

HDD vs. SSD: Unit economics<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The moral of the story is that the way you invest in drives, and how much you take things like drive size, drive type, and the failure rates we publish into consideration absolutely depends on your use case. It\u2019s not as simple as looking at our Drive Stats and picking the drive with the lowest annualized failure rate.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In Backblaze\u2019s early days, when we were focused on consumer backup, drive density and durability were the most important part of the equipment for us. We didn\u2019t care about speed. As our customers increasingly bring us newer<\/a> and more demanding<\/a> use cases, our calculus for the kinds of drives we fill our data centers with will change with them.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read what Chris Opat, Senior Vice President of Cloud Operations, has to say about the strategy of drive purchasing at the scale of enterprise. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":111950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,434,438],"tags":[468],"class_list":["post-111949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloud-storage","category-featured-1","category-featured-cloud-storage","tag-b2cloud","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Price of an Exabyte Hard Drive: Our Exabyte-Scale Investments<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/exabyte-scale-hard-drive-investments\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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Opat","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Backblaze-Author-Chris-Opat-150x150.jpg","url":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Backblaze-Author-Chris-Opat-150x150.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Backblaze-Author-Chris-Opat-150x150.jpg","caption":"Chris Opat"},"description":"Chris Opat joined is the former senior vice president of cloud operations in 2023. Before joining Backblaze, he served as senior vice president of platform engineering and operations at StackPath, a specialized provider in edge technology and content delivery. He brings a passion for building teams of experienced technologists who push the envelope to create a best-in-class experience for Backblaze customers. Chris has over 25 years of experience in building teams and technology at startup and scale-up companies. He also held leadership roles at CyrusOne, CompuCom, Cloudreach, and Bear Stearns\/JPMorgan. Chris earned his B.S. in Television & Digital Media Production at Ithaca College. Connect with him on LinkedIn.","url":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/author\/chrisopat\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/bb-bh-sac0-switch.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}