Petabyte Storage Cloud

**Malcolm** · 02-09-2009

BackBlaze have launched their Storage Pod suitable for people with large collection of digital music and video, only costs US$7,867 for 67 TB of storage and can be expanded.

How to Assemble a Backblaze Storage Pod

**zillion** · 02-09-2009

..and if you're not into downloading 'Aha Jim lad' videos, then you can use it to store your DVD cases by the looks of it.

**Mike** · 02-09-2009

You need 1024TiB to make a PiB :confused:

**hobwebs** · 02-09-2009

Sheeeh! They don't even give you a discount for buying 45 disc drives!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148337

Appendix A: Detailed Backblaze Storage Pod Parts List

1.5 TB SATA Data Drive
45 X Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 3.5″
@ $120.00 = $5,400

**Malcolm** · 02-09-2009

Originally Posted by hobwebs:
Sheeeh! They don't even give you a discount for buying 45 disc drives!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148337

Appendix A: Detailed Backblaze Storage Pod Parts List

1.5 TB SATA Data Drive
45 X Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 3.5″
@ $120.00 = $5,400

Nice colour though

**adamt** · 03-09-2009

I saw that this morning, and was actually quite excited.

Unfortunately, the consumer grade disks will mean a high failure rate with no hot-swap capability, the lack of an accelerator cache will mean slow transfers and the lack of iscsi support was the final nail in the coffin.

I can understand them not supporting NFS or SMB, but no iscsi??

I suppose it could be added with little difficulty, but I can't understand where the supposed scalability issues are with it. It's no fibre SAN, but it's surely better than a web interface??

I think these storage pods are probably quite useful for a backup service, which doesn't require fast access times and which can be taken offline to replace the frequently failed disks. I think I'll keep on with 3Par and HP EVA SAN storage for now.

**hobwebs** · 03-09-2009

Well Backblaze is all about online backup so I guess the speed of the pod is not very important. I thought you could hot swap SATA drives as long as their interfaces supported it?
Google has shown that consumer grade discs are feasible if you have enough of them. Yes, they are more prone to failure than their industrial grade counterparts but then again they are much cheaper to replace...

**adamt** · 03-09-2009

Originally Posted by hobwebs:
Well Backblaze is all about online backup so I guess the speed of the pod is not very important. I thought you could hot swap SATA drives as long as their interfaces supported it?

You might be right - I've never tried hotswap with SATA. I just always assumed it didn't support it, because I've never seen anything claim that it does.

The other issue with the design of the pods is that you can't actually reach the disks whilst it is racked, so you'll have to take the pod down and open it up anyway.

Might not be such a problem on clustered filesystems, mind.

**hobwebs** · 03-09-2009

From Wikipedia:

Originally Posted by :
Unlike PATA, both SATA and eSATA support hot-swapping by design. However, this feature requires proper support at the host, device (drive), and operating-system level. In general, all SATA devices (drives) support hot-swapping (due to the requirements on the device-side), but requisite support is less common on SATA host adapters.