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Brian from Backblaze here. > Have you ever computed how much power you would save if you turned them off when not needed? Electrical power is a gigantic part

Brian from Backblaze here. > Have you ever computed how much power you would save if you turned them off when not needed? Electrical power is a gigantic part of our datacenter bill (like 60%). However, we cannot really ever turn off the hard drives. If they were powered down, it would take too long to retrieve data. It would be like Amazon Glacier where it can take 15 minutes to get a single image back. > is every pod constantly in use? The way we built it, yes. If one user deletes a backup or unsubscribes from the Backblaze service, it frees a little bit of space on pods all over the datacenter. So we allow some other customer to use that space up as soon as we can. We also use ALL the pods in the datacenter to give us "breadth" to accept data faster. This is particularly helpful on surges of new customers due to a press event, or if a competitor like CrashPlan decides to exit the market.

amelius 9y ago
> If they were powered down, it would take too long to retrieve data. It would be like Amazon Glacier where it can take 15 minutes to get a single image back. Well, speaking for myself, I don't mind if I have to restore a backup, and have to wait 1 minute extra for a system to come online (that's about the typical boot time of a Linux system, so I suppose for a storage pod it would be about the same). By the way, it seems possible to power down an individual SATA drive if it is not in use: [1]. [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/112117/shutdown-my-backup-hard-disk-on-linux-when-i-dont-use-it https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/112117/shutdown-my-...
- infogulch 9y ago
  This is what I thought amelius' comment was originally about. You could save power on drives plus it would only take a few seconds to come back online. I imagine it could save a lot of electricity if the additional complication is worth it. Complications like a write cache drive in case of power failure, or grouping expected-cold data together. Also I wonder if powering the drive up and down occasionally will have a positive or negative impact on drive reliability compared to having it on 100% of the time.
- sml156 9y ago
  Interesting, your considering that your setup somehow compares to Blackblaze Also if if he says it takes about 15 Min's for it to come online and be usable in their massive data center I would believe him.
  - amelius 9y ago
    Not really, he was talking about Amazon's solution.
atYevP 9y ago
Yev here -> I'll piggy-back a little and say that not all the pods HAVE to be powered on in order for access to remain rapid. Our Vaults system spreads shards of the data out, so if one or two pods go in to maintenance in the same Vault at the same time, it doesn't really impact performance.

amelius 9y ago

> If they were powered down, it would take too long to retrieve data. It would be like Amazon Glacier where it can take 15 minutes to get a single image back. Well, speaking for myself, I don't mind if I have to restore a backup, and have to wait 1 minute extra for a system to come online (that's about the typical boot time of a Linux system, so I suppose for a storage pod it would be about the same). By the way, it seems possible to power down an individual SATA drive if it is not in use: [1]. [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/112117/shutdown-my-backup-hard-disk-on-linux-when-i-dont-use-it https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/112117/shutdown-my-...

infogulch 9y ago
This is what I thought amelius' comment was originally about. You could save power on drives plus it would only take a few seconds to come back online. I imagine it could save a lot of electricity if the additional complication is worth it. Complications like a write cache drive in case of power failure, or grouping expected-cold data together. Also I wonder if powering the drive up and down occasionally will have a positive or negative impact on drive reliability compared to having it on 100% of the time.
sml156 9y ago
Interesting, your considering that your setup somehow compares to Blackblaze Also if if he says it takes about 15 Min's for it to come online and be usable in their massive data center I would believe him.
- amelius 9y ago
  Not really, he was talking about Amazon's solution.

atYevP 9y ago

Yev here -> I'll piggy-back a little and say that not all the pods HAVE to be powered on in order for access to remain rapid. Our Vaults system spreads shards of the data out, so if one or two pods go in to maintenance in the same Vault at the same time, it doesn't really impact performance.