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> For Q1 2016 we are reporting on 61,590 operational hard drives ... [t]hese days we need to purchase drives in reasonably large quantities, 5,000 to 10,000 at

> For Q1 2016 we are reporting on 61,590 operational hard drives ... [t]hese days we need to purchase drives in reasonably large quantities, 5,000 to 10,000 at a time. To me, that's an astoundingly large number of hard drives. But I realise there are probably much bigger deployments. Does anybody happen to know just how many hard drives Amazon or Microsoft have for AWS/Azure?

atYevP 10y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> They have a lot more :D
- chiph 10y ago
  And yet, your quantities aren't enough to attract the attention of the WDC direct sales department?
  - atYevP 10y ago
    > And yet, your quantities aren't enough to attract the attention of the WDC direct sales department? We've just started heading down the direct paths, but yea it seems like the minimum order number to work direct with the manufacturers is about 10,000 hard drives per order. We aren't quite at that capacity and we don't like to keep inventory since we try to run pretty lean. Also the price for hard drives tends to drop by a small percentage monthly, so for every month we have excess inventory we purchased earlier, that could potentially be money left on the table. So our orders to be smaller than their minimums. We're inching towards it though :)
    - alecbaldwinlol 10y ago
      That seems like a silly minimum for WDC to have, unless the discounting is phenomenal (50%+) compared to other vendors. I'm asking myself, even if I'm a WDC rep that is selling hundreds of thousands of PC hard drives and having an excellent quarter/year, why would I turn away the business of a growing company? Tape cartridges can be purchased in packs of 20 from any corporate vendor and no order is too small to attract a rep's attention. I've seen deals (25th to 75th percentile) from $10,000 to $200,000, and the min/max deal range is from $2,000 to $500,000
      - atYevP 10y ago
        I imagine it has something to do with demand or their partnerships with their distributors. This is conjecture, but I'd think that in order to keep distribution deals/channels up they might have deals in place that stipulate any order over 10,000 goes direct and any order under goes to preferred distributors. No idea though, but that would make a smidge of sense.
alecbaldwinlol 10y ago
I imagine maybe 10x more than this. The numbers actually aren't too shocking if you think of the mirroring of data that's required for maximum uptime (not even archival), and the occasional disk failure. 1,000 TB (1PB) can be easily handled across ~150 (6-7TB)HDDs for one copy, but 300-450 HDDs would be required for additional mirroring. Largest tape cartridges out there are between 6 and 8.5 TBs, and cost around $22 per TB. That's only $22,000 per PB, and this is for high throughput cartridges like LTO7 or StorageTek Titanium. LTO5 is much cheaper. Considering that the largest tech companies and major organizations routinely cut POs for several $100ks and are dealing with 100s of PBs of data across disk, tape, DVDs etc, it isn't outside the realm of possibility to have 300,000+ individual disks and tapes floating out there :)
- justinsaccount 10y ago
  > 1,000 TB (1PB) can be easily handled across ~150 (6-7TB)HDDs for one copy, but 300-450 HDDs would be required for additional mirroring. Mirroring is not used at that scale https://www.backblaze.com/blog/reed-solomon/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/reed-solomon/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazurestorage/2012/06/13/usenix-best-paper-award-erasure-coding-in-windows-azure-storage/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazurestorage/2012/06...
  - alecbaldwinlol 10y ago
    That's all good, it would just increase the number of disks required to be purchased and the amount of electricity/cooling/floorspace to maintain them. It would add to the disk count, but not really affect cost per TB all that much. How do cloud storage vendors guarantee triple-mirroring and uptime then? Lots of 2TB drives? Lies? :)
    - rz2k 10y ago
      Does it say triple mirroring or triple redundancy? Take a look at the article from Backblaze for an overview of the math. In their case it might be called quadruple redundancy. 20 shards hold 17 shards of data with triple parity. Events destroying hard drives containing information about your data could happen three times, and you still wouldn't lose anything.
bluedino 10y ago
>> how many hard drives Amazon or Microsoft have for AWS/Azure? I'd like to know YouTube's totals with 500 hours of video being uploaded every minute...
- alecbaldwinlol 10y ago
  Tough to say, but if this link is right: http://video.stackexchange.com/questions/8850/typical-size-of-one-hour-long-mp4-video http://video.stackexchange.com/questions/8850/typical-size-o... Then being conservative, we can say an hour of video is 1-2GB of data, so between 500 and 1,000 GB of data uploaded (just to YT) every minute. Accounting for mirroring and compression, 525,949 minutes per year * 1 TB per minute = ~526 PB per year Ironically this would be about 65,743 8TB HDDs, which is close to the number in this article :)
  - bluedino 10y ago
    I had heard 1PB/day somewhere...
  - jonknee 10y ago
    They also store several copies of each video (different codecs and resolutions).

atYevP 10y ago

Yev from Backblaze here -> They have a lot more :D

chiph 10y ago
And yet, your quantities aren't enough to attract the attention of the WDC direct sales department?
- atYevP 10y ago
  > And yet, your quantities aren't enough to attract the attention of the WDC direct sales department? We've just started heading down the direct paths, but yea it seems like the minimum order number to work direct with the manufacturers is about 10,000 hard drives per order. We aren't quite at that capacity and we don't like to keep inventory since we try to run pretty lean. Also the price for hard drives tends to drop by a small percentage monthly, so for every month we have excess inventory we purchased earlier, that could potentially be money left on the table. So our orders to be smaller than their minimums. We're inching towards it though :)
  - alecbaldwinlol 10y ago
    That seems like a silly minimum for WDC to have, unless the discounting is phenomenal (50%+) compared to other vendors. I'm asking myself, even if I'm a WDC rep that is selling hundreds of thousands of PC hard drives and having an excellent quarter/year, why would I turn away the business of a growing company? Tape cartridges can be purchased in packs of 20 from any corporate vendor and no order is too small to attract a rep's attention. I've seen deals (25th to 75th percentile) from $10,000 to $200,000, and the min/max deal range is from $2,000 to $500,000
    - atYevP 10y ago
      I imagine it has something to do with demand or their partnerships with their distributors. This is conjecture, but I'd think that in order to keep distribution deals/channels up they might have deals in place that stipulate any order over 10,000 goes direct and any order under goes to preferred distributors. No idea though, but that would make a smidge of sense.

alecbaldwinlol 10y ago

I imagine maybe 10x more than this. The numbers actually aren't too shocking if you think of the mirroring of data that's required for maximum uptime (not even archival), and the occasional disk failure. 1,000 TB (1PB) can be easily handled across ~150 (6-7TB)HDDs for one copy, but 300-450 HDDs would be required for additional mirroring. Largest tape cartridges out there are between 6 and 8.5 TBs, and cost around $22 per TB. That's only $22,000 per PB, and this is for high throughput cartridges like LTO7 or StorageTek Titanium. LTO5 is much cheaper. Considering that the largest tech companies and major organizations routinely cut POs for several $100ks and are dealing with 100s of PBs of data across disk, tape, DVDs etc, it isn't outside the realm of possibility to have 300,000+ individual disks and tapes floating out there :)

justinsaccount 10y ago
> 1,000 TB (1PB) can be easily handled across ~150 (6-7TB)HDDs for one copy, but 300-450 HDDs would be required for additional mirroring. Mirroring is not used at that scale https://www.backblaze.com/blog/reed-solomon/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/reed-solomon/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazurestorage/2012/06/13/usenix-best-paper-award-erasure-coding-in-windows-azure-storage/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazurestorage/2012/06...
- alecbaldwinlol 10y ago
  That's all good, it would just increase the number of disks required to be purchased and the amount of electricity/cooling/floorspace to maintain them. It would add to the disk count, but not really affect cost per TB all that much. How do cloud storage vendors guarantee triple-mirroring and uptime then? Lots of 2TB drives? Lies? :)
  - rz2k 10y ago
    Does it say triple mirroring or triple redundancy? Take a look at the article from Backblaze for an overview of the math. In their case it might be called quadruple redundancy. 20 shards hold 17 shards of data with triple parity. Events destroying hard drives containing information about your data could happen three times, and you still wouldn't lose anything.

bluedino 10y ago

>> how many hard drives Amazon or Microsoft have for AWS/Azure? I'd like to know YouTube's totals with 500 hours of video being uploaded every minute...

alecbaldwinlol 10y ago
Tough to say, but if this link is right: http://video.stackexchange.com/questions/8850/typical-size-of-one-hour-long-mp4-video http://video.stackexchange.com/questions/8850/typical-size-o... Then being conservative, we can say an hour of video is 1-2GB of data, so between 500 and 1,000 GB of data uploaded (just to YT) every minute. Accounting for mirroring and compression, 525,949 minutes per year * 1 TB per minute = ~526 PB per year Ironically this would be about 65,743 8TB HDDs, which is close to the number in this article :)
- bluedino 10y ago
  I had heard 1PB/day somewhere...
- jonknee 10y ago
  They also store several copies of each video (different codecs and resolutions).