Yes, and we do this internally in our QA and load testing lab. It's an expensive waste to put $200,000 worth of drives in a 20 pod vault when all you need is 1/60th of that!

> are you tracking the cost of SSD drives? Do you expect cost parity soon?

Yes we track SSDs, and this is a hotly contested topic inside Backblaze. Personally I'm predicting they "cross over" in cost effectiveness within 2 years. But I don't have any more insight than you do, and many inside Backblaze disagree with me.

When I say "cost effective" that is total cost of ownership, which includes paying for less electricity to power the SSD, possibly the higher density of SSDs, and whatever failure rates of the SSDs forcing us to purchase more (might be better or worse than hard drives). So whatever our little spread sheet kicks out as cheaper -> that's the one we will purchase!

One random nice thing about SSDs is there will be less case vibration, and the drives shouldn't be affected AT ALL by the small amount of fan vibration.