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Comment by tzz | Hacker News Reader

Backblaze should expand their service to a cheaper cloud storage service similar to Amazon S3. They already have the infrastructure and the know-how.

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The business model is based on only rarely having to retrieve old data. I suspect they spin down the drives (or possibly hibernate the whole box) when not in active "load" mode.

You would need to compare the pricing here to Amazon Glacier, if anything.

Backblaze employee here. Our drives never spin down, although we have considered this because electricity is a large monthly bill to us.

Because it is "backup" we are pretty relaxed about shutting down our pods to do maintenance, like replacing a drive. But that only takes 10 minutes, we try not to have machines offline more than that if possible, or it causes support issues from people trying to restore files.

Don't the writing patterns make old data tend to remain in older drives and newer data ending up in the newer devices? If that's the case, would reads to those devices become increasingly infrequent to the point it would be worth to spin them down? Are you worried about the stresses induced by spin up/down and thermal variations?

In general that's my theory also (that after the initial fill, and maybe after an initial "data churn" we might power them down). However, a full pod often has at least one file from several hundred thousand individual customers. If any one of those customers prepares a restore, those drives have to be spinning. Also, we now have an iOS and Android app that you have access to all your files on your laptop from the convenience of your Smartphone - which again means the drives have to be spinning.

> Are you worried about the stresses induced by spin up/down and thermal variations?

Absolutely. Our datacenter techs are convinced that if they swap a drive QUICKLY the pod has a higher chance of coming back up without any problems, if they let the pod get entirely cool it statistically seems to have more problems when it comes back up - a full cool down and heat up seems to cause issues.

Do you foresee substantial electricity cost savings moving to Seagate's new 8TB archive drives that spin at a lower RPM constantly for energy savings?

Any thoughts to building Backblaze 20' or 40' cargo containers preloaded with rack-mounted pods and dropping them in locations with cheaper power?

Backblaze tech is not that impressive to give them competitive edge over the economy of scale of the big boys have. Amazon & co are not selling at cost, but at whatever the market with bear.

AS cool as it sounds, they probably feel they should continue executing on this very focused strategy first. They can branch out later.

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