One of the smart guys in our (Y!) cloud team just point out something to me that hadn't occurred to me. This system is definitely optimized for backup. That to

One of the smart guys in our (Y!) cloud team just point out something to me that hadn't occurred to me. This system is definitely optimized for backup. That totally make sense for Backblaze. However it's important to not compare this like for like with something like S3 which is optimized for much better read/write performance. At the basic level the cooling on this system seems minimal. Those tightly packed drives would sure get hot if they were all spinning a lot. More than that since they are using commodity consumer hardware, and they already used up their PCIe slots for the SATA controllers there isn't any place to add anything more than the gitabit (I assume) ethernet jack on the mobo. That means there throughput is limited. Again, this is a great system for backup. Most of the data will just sit happily sipping little power. However, if you are thinking of this as equivalent to a filer, that's an unfair comparison.