4 ms·
It does, but the Backblaze pod uses a backplane whereas this looks like it uses breakout cables which honestly kind of surprised me with the amount of drives in
by jonwest 4y ago
It does, but the Backblaze pod uses a backplane whereas this looks like it uses breakout cables which honestly kind of surprised me with the amount of drives in this.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoBackplanes are tricky and costly and in this case you need a custom one with sufficient power delivery. If you making a custom case for a fire-and-forget (and very rare HDD replacement, and in Netflix case - probably redundant on the node level) operation it makes sense to use breakout instead backplane.
- tmottabr 4y agobackblaze did used cables in at least one version of their storage pod, and they surely experimented with it before that.. and since netflix box known to have being inspired by earlier backblaze boxes it is not surprising they look similar..
- tmottabr 4y agoOne thing to add.. the version that blackblaze used direct cables the reason was that the backplanes they were using where the most unreliable part. this is something you can handle when all the servers are in your own DC like in blackblaze case. For netflix that need to built the server and ship it to someone else it makes more sense to go with direct cables as it would be more reliable and a cable problem would only affect a single driver, while the backplane will take 5 drivers out. also an regular sata cable is a easier part to source then a specific backplane..
- jonwest 4y agoEveryone’s made fair points! I stand corrected.