Man, I keep seeing awesome posts about Backblaze, and really would like to use them. However I run exclusively on linux these days, and they don't seem to have a Linux client.<p>Public pledge, if backblaze releases a linux client, even if it's command line only and requires that I manually edit an XML file, I'll purchase a 1 year subscription.
Just put a 6TB drive in my media server. I was going to put in another 4TB, but the cost per TB was not that much worse, so I decided to give it a go. There's also the issue that I only had room for one more drive anyway, and I wanted to RAID-1 the OS and important data partitions too.<p>I'm still learning the ins and outs of using btrfs too. I recently found this btrfs snapshot based backup utility that I'm going to give a try:<p><a href="https://github.com/ruediste1/btrbck" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ruediste1/btrbck</a><p>This should be a lot, lot faster and more efficient than using rsync and rsnapshot for disk-to-disk backups with my current scheme.
I always look forward to backblaze's posts.<p>Does anybody know if drive manufacturers pay attention to their posts about reliability? I know when I worked with mainframes we sent every bad drive back to IBM for failure analysis, but would Backblaze's aggregate data be useful to somebody like Seagate?
What is interesting is that backblaze still use the 45 drive in 4u config.<p>We use Dell/LSI/Netapp/engenio md3260s which pack 60 drives into the same space. We use raid 6, as we want the storage to manage the redundancy, not the software. With four hot spares we achieve a density of 170 tb usable per 4u (technically its 5U as we have a fileserver sitting on top. however assuming 48u it works out the same density)<p>With backblaze, assuming raid 6(unless you are using FEC then there is no other way.) you'll only get 120TB per 4u (but a file server as well)<p>The big advantage of the Dell/netapp/etc raid is that the drives are easily hot swappable. Ironically at the scale that backblaze are doing it, they are probably cheaper as well.
I don't understand this: 6TB drives are more expensive per gigabyte and they even mention it in their post. They say that they expect the drives to become cheaper over time and that's why they are switching now. Wait, what? Switching now when they are, I quote, "at the top of the curve"[1] does not make sense?<p>It might be that the physical space reduction compensates for it, but they don't mention that so I don't get it.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/blog-cost-per-gb-generic2.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/bl...</a>
I stopped using backblaze when I learned that they require you to TRANSMIT YOUR PRIVATE KEY TO THEIR SERVER in order to restore your files from backup.
I wonder if the power savings going from 4TB -> 6TB could make up for the difference/GB.<p>Spinning disks still operate at relatively high power (~8W), and I don't think this value would change with capacity (they don't add extra disk heads, I think its just more platters/higher capacity platters).<p>Pretty much the major cost running servers nowadays is simply the cost of the necessary electricity to run them and the cooling systems.<p>(Note that this doesn't apply for Backblazes usecase; they fill harddisks up, then pretty much power them down. That is why you can't instantly access your data stored with them)
I was always a fan of Backblaze sharing details about how they built out their storage - it made me feel that if I wanted to, I could also build a redundant/massive storage array.
For certain workloads these storage pods are much, much cheaper than S3. Anything where you are storing files that rapidly become stale, but still need to be instantly accessible for the rare random request.<p>I've only looked at it from the perspective of video files, though. Where I work we add a gigabyte of data per user per month. Eventually our S3 storage bill is going to be our largest cost due to compounding growth.
I'm wondering why Backblaze hasn't been moving toward cold storage? With a wait time on recovering/downloading files, I don't see an obvious reason why not. But I can see some cost and energy savings to be had.
This is really great! Anyone has any idea what kind of RAID are they running on their pods and what kind of read and write speed one can get from one of these?