4 ms·

When SSDs are comparable in price to HDDs. Which is... not soon.

• greggyb 6y ago
  It's more than just $/B of drives. It's $/B all-inclusive. Backblaze deploys their storage as storage pods (a server holding drives) in their vault architecture (many pods form a vault, with data sharded across pods in a vault).[0] So you would want to look at $/B of a vault. A vault includes the rest of the server hardware. The cost of the vault includes not just the server hardware, but also floor space in a data center and electricity to run the hardware. Flash storage is denser than HDDs and more power efficient, so you should expect a monetary breakeven at some point before SSDs are priced at similar $/B as HDDs. [0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...
  • bigiain 6y ago
    Also, I wonder about availability of off the shelf hardware for non HD alternatives? It's reasonably well understood how to plug 45 harddrives into a server, I wonder if you can buy hardware to drive 45m.2 2280 SSDs into one server/motherboard as easily?
    • greggyb 6y ago
      You could probably see benefits with 2.5" drives, just due to the form factor and lower power draw compared to 3.5" HDDs. If you wanted to put in a bit more work, you could shuck the 2.5" enclosures, as the PCB space of an SSD is usually significantly smaller than the volume of the enclosure.