brianwski

12 ms·

31.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > If they've hit on a different access pattern that is more gentle, that might be something useful for posterity and I hope they dig into that possibility. Internally at Backblaze, we're WAY mor
32.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I guess these Hard Drive Stats post cover disks used for their B2 service as well? Yes. The storage layer is storing both Backblaze Personal Backup files and B2 files. It's COMPLETELY interleaved,
33.
by brianwski 6y ago
> There are actually air filters ... through which drives breathe Although the helium drives are more sealed up, which also might be a factor?
34.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze, but mostly on the client that runs on desktops and laptops. > I'm not sure if Backblaze has a measure of the disk utilization or read/write load along with the failure rate. We publish the compl
35.
by brianwski 6y ago
> algorithm for labor due to drive installation and maintenance ... the rest of us don't have that so a single disk loss can ruin Saturday TOTALLY true. We staff our datacenters with our own datacenter technicians (Backblaze employ
36.
by brianwski 6y ago
> Guessing shit like the ST3000DM001 is a whole different thing entirely. :-) Yeah, there are times where the failure rate can rise so high it threatens the data durability. The WORST is when failures are time correlated. Let's s
37.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I wonder why Western Digital is almost absent, does anyone know why? Most of the time the answer comes down to price/GByte. But it isn't QUITE as simple as that. Backblaze tries to optimize f
38.
by brianwski 6y ago
> When I evaluated Backblaze, the amount of data that the client wrote to disk was almost identical to the amount of data that was backed up. This is a common mistake. It is true that during the initial backup this is (close to) the cas
39.
by brianwski 6y ago
> to store small files in RAM (for some well-chosen value of “small”, of course... The Backblaze client code currently puts that dividing line at 100 MBytes. Any file less than 100 MBytes we call a "small file" and those don&#
40.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I always thought peer agreements are under NDA. Surprise to see they talk openly. Both Backblaze and CloudFlare are very open about this. It is called the "Bandwidth Alliance", you can read a
41.
by brianwski 6y ago
> Halving the SSD lifetime is not something I’d personally call meaningless ... No, it doesn't halve the SSD lifetime. It is a little odd of you to make that claim. First of all, you are assuming that 100% of SSDs die from being wri
42.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so you should check up to see if what I say is true and keep me honest. > Zero-knowledge encryption? You don’t need that[0][1]. This is not our position, and I feel it is disingenuous of you to say that.
43.
by brianwski 6y ago
> You silently and/or passive aggressively throttle the whales in such a way that they go away. Carbonite is an online backup provider that got caught doing this by the U.K. government in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org&#x
44.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > the economics just don't work [for Unlimited] long-term due to people who abuse it. How does this apply to Backblaze's unlimited backup service? So far, it has worked out for us (going on 14 y
45.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > though they're less reliable, it's cheaper to buy more of them Exactly. Each month our buyers go out and get bids for more drives. The cost is input into a little spreadsheet, and the SPREAD
46.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > AKA toss a few pods of WD's/etc in there even if they are slightly more expensive/whatever. If you see "low numbers" of one particular drive model in the stats, that is usually
47.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Our failure rates were consistently much higher compared to Backblaze That's interesting. > The overall workload on the clusters was extremely heavy That is the most likely explanation. We see
48.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze and was there during the Thailand flooding. > While the shucked drives might not have had the warranties We haven't shucked drives in a while. The main advantage was when this artificial price differ
49.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I'd guess this is an effective piece of marketing. Yes, it really has been good to us. :-) It is data we would collect internally for our own decision making and tracking even if we didn't re
50.
by brianwski 6y ago
> why wouldn't you just handle it on your end and provide the public with a single domain? That is what we did for the S3 protocol. It adds cost via a load balancer. The whole original storage design was based on the fact that in o
51.
by brianwski 6y ago
> I'd love to see the "little delay" when reconstructing a file qualified somewhat. Are we talking < 5s or < 10s? I asked the engineers that work on that code, and they pulled a random sample from the logs (we time a
52.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > There is no mention of the durability guarantees that s3 has. I wrote this blog post doing some of our math around this: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-storage-durability&#x2F
53.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > The DNS resolver library of your client is allowed to cache the IP address for a given hostname for up to TTL Not only that, but one mistake a lot of developers made early on was asking for a location t
54.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. I'm also not a lawyer. :-) > Can Amazon actually patent their API (per the google vs oracle case) - basically like prevent other vendors to provide S3 APIs so that Amazon can lock in users. Most li
55.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I really want to see lightning fast response times and TTFB (Time To First Byte Served) If a file is "cold" (nobody has requested it in the last 24 hours) then it needs to be reconstructed fro
56.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > So how did they manage to get rid of those hidden costs? Or is the new S3 compatible API more expensive? The new S3 compatible APIs are the same cost as the original native B2 APIs. I'm the author
57.
by brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > B2, as a storage service, is not really intended for "serving web pages and websites" — it's for larger files, binaries, etc It might be missing a couple features
58.
by brianwski 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > the B2 API is much slower than S3. This is "generally true" for 1 upload thread. We aren't even sure what Amazon is doing differently, but they can be a little f
59.
by brianwski 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Last I checked, Backblaze still stores most data in 1 location, no? Backblaze now has multiple regions! One in Europe (Netherlands) and one is called "US-West". Quietly the US-West is actual
60.
by brianwski 7y ago
Backblaze CTO here.... > I found libcurl difficult to use in 'C' Umm.... it is literally the most simple API that could possibly exist? Here are the four lines in 'C' to fetch a URL: curl_global_init(CURL_GLOBAL_SSL)

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