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Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

> Only thing that's really perplexing is why they keep buying more and more of the high-failure-rate Seagate 12 TB drives.

I am guessing they RMA the drives and get replacements.

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Your comment just sparked an interesting question in my mind: If a drive has failed, until now I always imagined the drive was just trashed. But now that you mention they are probably RMA'ing them, do you think that BackBlaze send the RMA drives through a magnetic tunnel of some sort before they ship the drives back to the manufacturer? Because otherwise, how do they ensure potentially unencrypted customer files are not accessed during the repair/refurbishment process?

When I back things up with BackBlaze, they leave my computer encrypted, so they're encrypted at rest with them.

I work at a large B2B SaaS that stores customer data, we pay extra for the option not to return failed drives that can't be wiped for RMA. We still get a replacement but the original is physically destroyed with a shredder.

I'd hope that their data is all encrypted at rest. Compared to the bandwidth of spinning disks, the cost of doing hardware assisted AES isn't big.

Yeah, I would expect any data reaching the drives to be encrypted by Backblaze, with the key newer reaching the disk.

You could even have keys per disk and wipe them when a disk fails.

Either way, you should be fine to RMA the drives as for an external observer without the keys they just contain random noise.

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