Disclaimer: I wrote the blog post. :-) > spread across 10,000 drives, which is unrealistic I claim it is also undesirable. Backblaze specifically made the co

Disclaimer: I wrote the blog post. :-) > spread across 10,000 drives, which is unrealistic I claim it is also undesirable. Backblaze specifically made the conscious decision that the parts of any one single "large file" (these can be up to 10 TBytes each) are all stored within the same "vault". A vault is 20 computers in 20 separate racks. This allows a single vault to check the consistency and integrity of a large file periodically without communicating to other vaults in the datacenter. The vaults have been a really good unit of scaling for Backblaze. If the vaults can maintain their performance, then we know we can just stamp out more vaults because there is almost no communication between vaults.