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The article mentions having to buy 10k+ new drives in the next few months? Is that number just your average increase for new drives and/or replacements for fail

The article mentions having to buy 10k+ new drives in the next few months? Is that number just your average increase for new drives and/or replacements for failed drives? Or does it include planned replacement of older pods with smaller drives? I'm curious if there's a point where you've found it less expensive (or less problematic with drive failure rates per pod) to replace and upgrade older pods compared to just letting them continue to run.

bluedino 12y ago
They used to say they don't spend any money on drive replacements (except for labor, obviously) because of the drives having 3-year warranties. Those were using 1.5TB drives. However, the original 67TB pods came out in 2009 and wouldn't be warrantied anymore. According to their blog they took until 2011 to hit 10PB, which would be roughly 150 of the original 67TB pods. The 6TB drives are 4 times better, so they'd be able to replace all of those with just 40 of the new pods, I'm sure the savings in electricity and rack space would be too huge to pass up. Then again, they have their own datacenter space now, so space probably isn't an issue but I'm sure electricity is. They said something around $2,100 a rack (which holds 10 pods) for electricity, space, and data. They were incredibly stoked to cut that in half by moving to 3TB drives with the 2.0 version of the pod so I'm sure cutting that in half excited them as well :)
- brianwski 12y ago
  Backblaze employee here. Some of the drives are "voided warranty" now, like the ones we "shuck" out of USB enclosures. We just include that into our cost analysis - for example if 5 percent of the drives fail, the warranty saves you 5 percent of cost - so if purchasing the warranty costs 3 percent we do it, but if purchasing the warranty costs 7 percent we do without.
- brianwski 12y ago
  Also, we still pay "per rack" but prices are now a fraction of the $2,100 (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say exact numbers).
brianwski 12y ago
Backblaze employee here. We have about 900+ pods, each with 45 drives, so that makes a little less than 45,000 drives. We publish our annual failure rates, but let's say blended between drive types it's like 2-3 percent. Think we replace 4-6 drives every day? But the main reason we buy drives is we deploy 30 new pods a month right now, and it's increasing. So we deploy 1,400 drives a month or so in new pods. Sometimes we buy in 3 month batches (to get a break on price) so then you start talking about a 5,000 hard drive purchase in one shot. At $260/drive, you can see how we care deeply about EXACT failure rates. Why isn't Google and Amazon publishing failure rates also? Why only Backblaze?!

bluedino 12y ago

They used to say they don't spend any money on drive replacements (except for labor, obviously) because of the drives having 3-year warranties. Those were using 1.5TB drives. However, the original 67TB pods came out in 2009 and wouldn't be warrantied anymore. According to their blog they took until 2011 to hit 10PB, which would be roughly 150 of the original 67TB pods. The 6TB drives are 4 times better, so they'd be able to replace all of those with just 40 of the new pods, I'm sure the savings in electricity and rack space would be too huge to pass up. Then again, they have their own datacenter space now, so space probably isn't an issue but I'm sure electricity is. They said something around $2,100 a rack (which holds 10 pods) for electricity, space, and data. They were incredibly stoked to cut that in half by moving to 3TB drives with the 2.0 version of the pod so I'm sure cutting that in half excited them as well :)

brianwski 12y ago
Backblaze employee here. Some of the drives are "voided warranty" now, like the ones we "shuck" out of USB enclosures. We just include that into our cost analysis - for example if 5 percent of the drives fail, the warranty saves you 5 percent of cost - so if purchasing the warranty costs 3 percent we do it, but if purchasing the warranty costs 7 percent we do without.
brianwski 12y ago
Also, we still pay "per rack" but prices are now a fraction of the $2,100 (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say exact numbers).

brianwski 12y ago

Backblaze employee here. We have about 900+ pods, each with 45 drives, so that makes a little less than 45,000 drives. We publish our annual failure rates, but let's say blended between drive types it's like 2-3 percent. Think we replace 4-6 drives every day? But the main reason we buy drives is we deploy 30 new pods a month right now, and it's increasing. So we deploy 1,400 drives a month or so in new pods. Sometimes we buy in 3 month batches (to get a break on price) so then you start talking about a 5,000 hard drive purchase in one shot. At $260/drive, you can see how we care deeply about EXACT failure rates. Why isn't Google and Amazon publishing failure rates also? Why only Backblaze?!