6 ms·

Do BB publish pricing of what they paid for drives? Sort of a TB/$/Failure rate. Those 12TB HGST drives must cost a ton

by Dennip 8y ago

geostyx 8y ago
No they don't.
- jason46 8y ago
  $33,500 if you bought them from amazon right now, plus whatever it costs to ship 79 hard drives.
  - brianwski 8y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > $33,500 if you bought them from amazon right now About half of all of the money that flows into Backblaze from customers gets spent on the datacenter, and the largest component of that is drives. I think sales tax and property tax is the second largest datacenter component. It turns out you don't just owe property tax on buildings and land - if you own something of significant worth like $10 million worth of hard drives in a large pile, you owe the government "property tax" every month for owning that property.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      Yes, called "tangible personal property tax" (even though it's used for business). Some states have it and some don't, with various exceptions and whatnot in all of them.
    - PhantomGremlin 8y ago
      if you own something of significant worth like $10 million worth of hard drives in a large pile, you owe the government "property tax" every month for owning that property. If you're Intel, you potentially owe "property tax" every month on all the equipment in multi-billion dollar fabs. That's why those fabs only get built in states where the tax doesn't apply or where the state/county agrees to forego it.
    - dorfsmay 8y ago
      I had never thought of income on capital vs income before Piketty made it the center of his theories, but since then realised that it is exactly what property tax is, which is weird that it is only in one type of capital.
atYevP 8y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> We don't typically post the cost of the drives, but one thing you can be sure of, is that we go for as good of a price-to-density ratio as we can! So if they were much more expensive than their counterparts we would likely avoid them until they came down enough for us to test them out!
brianwski 8y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Do BB publish pricing of what they paid for drives? ... a TB/$/Failure rate Thank you, that is EXACTLY the correct way to look at the failure statistics! So many people seem to sort the list by failure rate and think no matter what the cost, the lowest failure rate wins. For Backblaze, we just feed it back into the cost calculation. For example: If a drive fails 1% more often but is 2% cheaper in total cost of ownership, we buy that drive. Now, total cost of ownership includes the physical space rental so more dense drives can be more expensive per TByte in raw drive cost because we can make some of that back up in physical space rental. Also, most drives seem to take about the same amount of electricity unrelated to how many TBytes are contained inside, so double the drive density is like saying it takes half as much electricity over its 4 - 5 year lifespan. Electricity is one of our largest datacenter costs, so we keep an eye on that also. But to answer your very first question, unfortunately we cannot release the price we paid for the drives due to the vendors requesting we don't disclose prices. But don't think we have some magically huge discount or anything. Most of the time we are literally paying about retail, maybe a 3% - 5% discount for buying in bulk orders of over 10,000 drives. But for reasons nobody at Backblaze can figure out, sometimes a bunch of new drives appears randomly at a really good discount price, then returns to the original price the next month. It might be some attempt along the supply chain to boost monthly or quarterly top line at the expense of profits, I don't know.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  Cost adjusted by failure rate is definitely the best metric for a RAID. But when it's only one or two disks, and any failure means a giant hassle, it can be worth paying more to improve the odds.
- brokenmachine 8y ago
  When I'm just buying drives for my home machines, I'd pay much more for a lower failure rate because a dead drive means a lot of time and massive inconvenience plus some research and a trip to the computer store to buy a replacement. I'd honestly pay double if I could be guaranteed to avoid all that.
  - 8y ago

Do BB publish pricing of what they paid for drives? Sort of a TB/$/Failure rate. Those 12TB HGST drives must cost a ton

by Dennip 8y ago

Do BB publish pricing of what they paid for drives? Sort of a TB/$/Failure rate. Those 12TB HGST drives must cost a ton

geostyx 8y ago

No they don't.

jason46 8y ago
$33,500 if you bought them from amazon right now, plus whatever it costs to ship 79 hard drives.
- brianwski 8y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > $33,500 if you bought them from amazon right now About half of all of the money that flows into Backblaze from customers gets spent on the datacenter, and the largest component of that is drives. I think sales tax and property tax is the second largest datacenter component. It turns out you don't just owe property tax on buildings and land - if you own something of significant worth like $10 million worth of hard drives in a large pile, you owe the government "property tax" every month for owning that property.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    Yes, called "tangible personal property tax" (even though it's used for business). Some states have it and some don't, with various exceptions and whatnot in all of them.
  - PhantomGremlin 8y ago
    if you own something of significant worth like $10 million worth of hard drives in a large pile, you owe the government "property tax" every month for owning that property. If you're Intel, you potentially owe "property tax" every month on all the equipment in multi-billion dollar fabs. That's why those fabs only get built in states where the tax doesn't apply or where the state/county agrees to forego it.
  - dorfsmay 8y ago
    I had never thought of income on capital vs income before Piketty made it the center of his theories, but since then realised that it is exactly what property tax is, which is weird that it is only in one type of capital.

atYevP 8y ago

Yev from Backblaze here -> We don't typically post the cost of the drives, but one thing you can be sure of, is that we go for as good of a price-to-density ratio as we can! So if they were much more expensive than their counterparts we would likely avoid them until they came down enough for us to test them out!

brianwski 8y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Do BB publish pricing of what they paid for drives? ... a TB/$/Failure rate Thank you, that is EXACTLY the correct way to look at the failure statistics! So many people seem to sort the list by failure rate and think no matter what the cost, the lowest failure rate wins. For Backblaze, we just feed it back into the cost calculation. For example: If a drive fails 1% more often but is 2% cheaper in total cost of ownership, we buy that drive. Now, total cost of ownership includes the physical space rental so more dense drives can be more expensive per TByte in raw drive cost because we can make some of that back up in physical space rental. Also, most drives seem to take about the same amount of electricity unrelated to how many TBytes are contained inside, so double the drive density is like saying it takes half as much electricity over its 4 - 5 year lifespan. Electricity is one of our largest datacenter costs, so we keep an eye on that also. But to answer your very first question, unfortunately we cannot release the price we paid for the drives due to the vendors requesting we don't disclose prices. But don't think we have some magically huge discount or anything. Most of the time we are literally paying about retail, maybe a 3% - 5% discount for buying in bulk orders of over 10,000 drives. But for reasons nobody at Backblaze can figure out, sometimes a bunch of new drives appears randomly at a really good discount price, then returns to the original price the next month. It might be some attempt along the supply chain to boost monthly or quarterly top line at the expense of profits, I don't know.

Dylan16807 8y ago
Cost adjusted by failure rate is definitely the best metric for a RAID. But when it's only one or two disks, and any failure means a giant hassle, it can be worth paying more to improve the odds.
brokenmachine 8y ago
When I'm just buying drives for my home machines, I'd pay much more for a lower failure rate because a dead drive means a lot of time and massive inconvenience plus some research and a trip to the computer store to buy a replacement. I'd honestly pay double if I could be guaranteed to avoid all that.
- 8y ago