> For all three, it seems their spindles, actuators, and media are starting to wear out after seven years or so of constant spinning.<p>Seven years is indeed a lot of revolutions if they're constantly at 5,000 RPM or more.<p>Are those drives really live for all that time?<p>I'd expect that Backblaze's business model requires lots of storage and not a lot of access/transfer - lots of write once/read never data. Their storage pods have dual 10Gb network ports, but with <i>60</i> drives in a box, each capable of 6 Gb transfer speeds, you can only full use about 4 drives at a time. Are the other 56 drives spinning at full speed all the time, or parked?
I notice in the pictures they're still using their <i>Pod</i> storage systems for imagery, didn't they switch over to a Supermicro chassis recently? j I'm curious if so what they settled on with density, 45-60-90 drives? Servers or Jbods etc.<p>Over the years, 45drives has put an extreme premium on their systems compared to supermicro. We have a half dozen or so of the <i>storinator</i> chassis and we've switched back to supermicro high density storage systems, including some of their top load 90 bay jbods. It's been more cost effective for us, i'm wondering if that's the same for Backblaze.<p>I've been a backblaze customer for around 10 years, it's been great for home systems. Always love this transparency in their reports.
I love that bb is publishing this information but it may result in driving up the cost of the most reliable hdds which ends up costing them more with future drive purchases assuming they gravitate to buying more reliable drives in the future.
Thanks for this. I just bought new 14tb drives for my synology nas, and I looked at your data when I did so.<p>Separately, my nas running RAID 10 worked as it was supposed to: I hot swapped the drives one at a time over several weeks, and went from 7tb storage to something like 24tb with no downtime or hassle. The device has been sitting in my basement for years, and it was cool to see the raid technology work as intended after all this time.
Any predictions when SSD will take over HDD for storage from what I understand <$50/TB has been reached for SSD. With higher reliability and less electricity consumption I am wondering at what price it will be more economical to go to SSD completely.