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"We started drive farming--buying external drives from retail stores, cracking open the cases, and placing the drives in our servers." As a bootstrap lover, th
by codegeek 13y ago
"We started drive farming--buying external drives from retail stores, cracking open the cases, and placing the drives in our servers."
As a bootstrap lover, this is awesome even though critics can question this especially since they are a backup company.
- bluedino 13y agoThey mention in a blog post that they don't buy enough drives to order directly from the manufacturers, much less at a discount. They had to do some pretty interesting things during the Thailand floods.
- RyanZAG 13y agoYou missed the point of the OP's post - the company sells a backup service, which means losing a customer's data is a very bad thing. Breaking open retail external drives and moving those hard-drives into a server is not something that inspires confidence in their ability to actually keep the data safe. The OP's point was a confidence issue, and not necessarily that there was a better option that could have been taken.
- bluedino 13y agoThe pods have internal redundancy, and your data is stored on more than one pod, so I'm okay with them using consumer hardware to back my data up. They also wouldn't be doing it if they weren't sure that the drives were reliable enough for that use.
- rubinelli 13y agoThat's one of my favorite uses of probability: if you know what you are doing, you can build extremely reliable systems out of unreliable components.
- klipt 13y agoEven the best hard drives will fail eventually, so you need a redundant failure-recovery system anyway. And once you have that, using commodity hard drives shouldn't be a problem.