Interesting Read About a Company Named Backblaze and The Hardware They Use

[grimm2000]

I finally got an answer from Chyangfun

 

 

Dear Nicholas,

 

Thanks your E-mail, attached 1 is CFI-B5253ER spec, FYR.

 

CFI-B53PM backplane the price / quantity as follow:

50pcs US43

40pcs US43.5

30pcs US44

20pcs US44.5

10pcs US45

1pc US46

 

Please let me know the quantity, so I can estimate the EMS freight to you, Thanks!

You can sign the credit card (attached 2) to me or T/T to me, please let me know your address & TEL, so I can send EMS to you, may 4~5 days arrive

 

 

I plan to order a couple to see how they work.  If anyone else is interested, maybe we could bundle an order and freight charges.  I will wait a week to see if anyone is interested.

[lionelhutz]

I finally got an answer from Chyangfun

 

Good job going for it and getting the info. Hope they work out and you can build some cheap storage.

 

Peter

[markguy]

I plan to order a couple to see how they work.  If anyone else is interested, maybe we could bundle an order and freight charges.  I will wait a week to see if anyone is interested.

 

Any news on this front?

[dinaras]

wow nice case

[res2cou]

This is nice, looking at this i might have to have a rethink

 

1x Asus AT3GC-1 mini-ITX, Motherboard, Atom 330 CPU On Board                                                        £ 66

1x PCI RAID 5 Controller SATA 2 II 300 SiI3124                                                                                  £ 50

4x SerialATA Backplate NA910C 5x SATA DEVICE - 1x Multiplier-x5 port (eSATA) SiI3726                          £225

 

Throw in the ram, cables and drives of choice you have a setup that can take 22 SATA drives with Gigabit LAN, duel core 1.6Ghz cpu and not be loading up the elec bill!

 

Use the 20x ports for data drives and the 2 onboard for cache/parity.

 

 

[neilt0]

The new version 2.0 of the Backblaze storage pod (thanks for the link, tedder)!

 

http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/

 

Petabytes on a Budget v2.0: Revealing More Secrets

 

[vca]

Their comment about finding far fewer problems with the Hitachi 5K3000 drives than the Western Digital or Seagates is of interest:

 

The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding reliability. The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully.

 

Regards,

 

Stephen

[neilt0]

Their comment about finding far fewer problems with the Hitachi 5K3000 drives than the Western Digital or Seagates is of interest:

 

The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding reliability. The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully.

 

Regards,

 

Stephen

 

Yes, they mention those drives a couple of times. They have 9,045 drives and:

 

All told, Sean replaces approximately 10 drives per week, indicating a 5 percent per year drive failure rate across the entire fleet, which includes infant mortality and also the higher failure rates of previous drives. (We are currently seeing failures in less than 1 percent of the Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630 drives that we’re installing in pod 2.0.)

 

Some other interesting points:

 

We monitor the temperature of every drive in our datacenter through the standard SMART interface, and we’ve observed in the past three years that: 1) hard drives in pods in the top of racks run three degrees warmer on average than pods in the lower shelves; 2) drives in the center of the pod run five degrees warmer than those on the perimeter; 3) pods do not need all six fans—the drives maintain the recommended operating temperature with as few as two fans; and 4) heat doesn’t correlate with drive failure (at least in the ranges seen in storage pods).

 

One important note: Because all of the parts (including drives) in the Backblaze storage pod come with a three-year warranty, we rarely pay for a replacement part. The drive manufacturers take back failed drives with “no questions asked” and send free replacements.