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I was under the impression that Glacier is hard drive backed, not tape backed?

• jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
  Yeah, it's spinning disk backed. What's different is the drives are aggregated up on hosts under the design assumption that most of the drives will be powered off most of the time, allowing a lower cost per byte.
• Hamuko 6y ago
  Some industry insider has claimed that it's tape-backed. There's also been speculation that it's actually based on optical media.
  • londons_explore 6y ago
    It's totally backed on "we have loads of hard drives with spare storage capacity but no IO capacity, so sell it off cheap, but make sure it doesn't perform too well or it'll eat into our other products". Nearly all cloud providers have more storage bytes than they have IO (ie. each individual hard drive receives so many read/write requests per second that if they filled the drive all the way to full some read/write requests couldn't be handled and would be unacceptably delayed)