Fascinating read, and its nice to see he brought up a lot of the concerns that were mentioned here. A few things that I noticed: He mentioned that 1 Disk uses

Fascinating read, and its nice to see he brought up a lot of the concerns that were mentioned here. A few things that I noticed: He mentioned that 1 Disk uses 120 MB/s, so 5 of them is 600 MB/s. He then says that converts to 6 GB/s. Now, I'm not all that familiar with speeds, but I know 1000 MB is 1 GB, so shouldn't 600 MB/s be .6 GB/s? Other than that, he raised a number of valid points. The Backblaze system is NOT general purpose. Its designed to take a bunch of data (Backups) and hold on to it for as long as possible. In that situation you don't need high Throughput, or even all that reliable hardware. Once the drives are full, their usage will drop, and as long as the RAID can be kept up to keep the data secure, as long as costs stay down they're fine to keep replacing hardware. One thing of note, and something I never saw in the Backblaze article: Their service promises to hold your data for 50 years. Assuming that one of their pods is filled, what is the estimated cost to keep that data over the course of 50 years? I would assume they calculated that out, and that the data showed to go with the consumer grade parts, but I would really like to see the numbers.