I wonder how long it will be before backblaze moves to SSDs. Obviously a lot more expensive right now, but with the lower power consumption/heat and ability to cram way more in, might be sooner than we think?
Though cross-over point is still some time away, a decade or so?
Just seems that the spinning rust guys have to jump through some pretty extreme hoops to get density up, while the flash guys "just" have to reduce cost, which gives them more angles of attack (ie either further density increase or process optimization).
Backblaze deploys their storage as storage pods (a server holding drives) in their vault architecture (many pods form a vault, with data sharded across pods in a vault).[0]
So you would want to look at $/B of a vault. A vault includes the rest of the server hardware. The cost of the vault includes not just the server hardware, but also floor space in a data center and electricity to run the hardware. Flash storage is denser than HDDs and more power efficient, so you should expect a monetary breakeven at some point before SSDs are priced at similar $/B as HDDs.
[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...
It's reasonably well understood how to plug 45 harddrives into a server, I wonder if you can buy hardware to drive 45m.2 2280 SSDs into one server/motherboard as easily?