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Comment by davis_m | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure that the move to direct wire was done purely because of the former backplanes being error prone, but the fact that they realize finding the parts is difficult for others and mentioning it in the blog post shows that the guys at Backblaze care about more than just making money.

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Yev from Backblaze -> We do! In fact we make $0 off of the pod design and why we open sourced it. We want other folks to tinker, so we try to stay as open as possible about the design and building of the pods!

Question: Has any of your design improvements come from the community as a result of being open? And do you end up getting better pricing from your suppliers because there is a bigger market for this design?

Yes actually! One of the first things that the community came back with after Version 1 was that the hard drives vibrated a bit hard for most use-cases. They recommended we use "hard drive vibration dampening sleeves" (rubber bands) to make the drive fit a bit more snug. It worked like a charm! We don't really get much better pricing, though sometimes we get a small discount because we buy some pods/parts in bulk, though not in extreme quantities.

I really love these technical blog posts (and the designs, of course). Did you ever calculate something like mean-failure rate for pods? Such data might be helpful when evaluating if the architecture is viable for a certain use-case. I'm thinking both disk-loss (which you've blogged about before), but also aggregate failure rates (psu, controller cards etc)?

I'm thinking that for small-medium deployments, (with archiving in mind) three pods would be a reasonable minimum, possibly starting them out sparse (single radi6 to each pod, say)?

I'm aware there aren't any silver bullets :-)

Not the failure rate of pods themselves, but we do keep track of the failed drives within them. We did publish some blog posts about those stats, you can find them on blog.backblaze.com! The pods as a whole are pretty stable, them moving parts within them...not so much! Which is one of the reasons we went to direct wired connections!

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