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It's 135TB worth of drives, but with RAID don't you see a far less useable amount?

Also, considering saving money on hardware costs is a key factor in Backblaze staying competitive, they must be saving money elsewhere and/or have other competitive advantages. Otherwise releasing this information would be akin to publishing a restaurant's 'secret sauce'.

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Anybody who builds their own pod is welcome to use RAID or not, and which RAID you choose will affect your final numbers. At Backblaze, we configure it as RAID 6 groups, each group is 15 drives which includes 2 parity drives. So you are down to 13/15 = 86.67 percent of the raw unformatted space BEFORE the overhead of ext4 which adds a little tiny bit extra. So after formatting in our datacenter we are left with about 116 TBytes of storage space for customer files. On the other hand, we use lossless compression on the customer's files before transmitting to the pod, so it can sometimes appear like we are fitting more than 116 TBytes of customer data on a pod, if that makes sense.

I'd say any competitor worth worrying about would be able to build an equivalent system from scratch pretty easily, so I don't think they're risking that much. Convincing users that you'll be trustworthy, secure and around in 5-10 years is a much greater hurdle.

On the other hand, I read this article and I read their last one, when it too shot to the top of HN. Geeks go nuts for hardware porn, and are a great audience to sell these kinds of services to. So the marketing benefits are probably quite substantial.

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