This is so cool, and it's awesome that they're doing this. Backblaze is essentially getting "free" waste disposal but is giving back to the community in doing so. This fosters a lot of goodwill.

Unfortunately I'm nowhere near California, so I'm a bit jealous. Does anyone know of any companies that do this on the east coast? I'd love "free" abandoned hardware.

Isn't cheap abandoned hardware readily available at most flee markets, garage sales, etc?

It seems like Europeans recycle their electronics much more thoroughly than Americans.

That makes me a very sad retro geek.

There is lots of recycling and second hand in the united states. I can find a lot of toasters, very few computer parts. If I were to offer my old tech parts, I would get very few people who even knew what they were. In a bigger area like Boston, you can have a healthy exchange, but not in 50,000-people-ville, USA.

I think what you are lamenting is population density in the US vs EU.

You have a point. There are a couple million people in Ireland and one working Tektronix 4014 terminal. I would expect to be a hundred of them in the US, which doesn't seem that far off ;-)

We should have more DEC terminals though. We had a factory in Galway.

Oh boy. Gonna have a huge RSVP line. I can't believe they thought these would last eight hours considering they only have about 200 or so from what employees are saying. There will be a line around the block for 24 hours if they don't do a form / queue / lottery. The components (without drives) cost about $1500-2000 each.

For those interested, this information (~200 units, 2 per person) was shared on Reddit and wasn't on the original article. As for the time-frame, if they manage one transaction (giving one person 2 units) per five minutes on average, they roughly fit into eight hours.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/bz2yj6/backblaze_g...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/bz2yj6/backblaze_g...

> Oh boy. Gonna have a huge RSVP line

Looks like great opportunity for calling food trucks/bringing barbecue equipment and throwing some geek party ;)

I'd love to grab one. Problem is, in the absence of any disclaimer such as "Max 2 per person", I'm expecting some asshole opportunist to camp out and take a pallet full to re-sell on eBay.

Yev has said there will be max 2 per person.

I don’t doubt backblaze is truly giving these away with no strings attached, but even if I was in the same neighborhood, I would assume somebody more determined than me is already waiting with a uhaul outside the pickup spot.

pro-active complaining about predicted assholes. I like it.

For what it matters, you'll probably be right, but i'd have a hard time making plans with that outlook.

Hoooooooo boy I live 6 miles away from the pickup. I think I’ll swing by and try to grab one. No idea what I’ll do with it but I’m sure I’ll find something.

I have a closet full of random old gadgets that I had no idea what I would do with before acquiring them. My advice is: if you don't have a plan, leave it be. Let it collect dust in someone else's closet.

Don't do this.

These hold dozens of drives, over half a petabyte full, and use a ton of power. If you're not going to fill it (which will be expensive), and use it (which will cost money every month), leave it for someone who will.

For home use, a Plex Server with uncompressed rips with pre-transcoded versions at every resolution, for your extended family's DVD and Blu-Ray collections, will still not even begin to fill it. (Figure 10,000 uncompressed Blu-Rays.)

For startup use with 100 TB - 500 TB storage needs, get two matching ones, fill them both, run as master/slave so you have hardware redundancy.

See more about the platform here:

http://www.45drives.com

---

// PS. Shout out to Backblaze, remembering working with you on the first few iterations of these is a blast from the past.

can you pick me one up to, and ship it :)

Wow this is really tempting for me to make the trek down from Portland. I run a storniator which is pretty similar to their 3.0 pods and the thing is a beast.

Would you mind elaborating on your Storinator setup?

Sure, it's quite a few years old at this point but basic specs:

- Supermicro X10DRL-i

- Dual XeonE5-2620 v3 @ 2.40GHz

- 32 gigs ram

- 32 gig boot stick

- 512 cache ssd (being upgraded soon to 1tb)

- 27 8TB drives, one for parity, one currently dead that's waiting a replacement

Running Unraid which has served me well.

Thing is sitting in a lack table from ikea which this particular model they stopped making. It has a bottom shelf and came on casters.

One thing I did do right away was replace the stock cpu fans for noctuas since the server would be right next to me and noise was a big deal. Temps are a little higher than they would be with the stock fans but still within safe ranges even under load.

Im almost out of space and I don't really want to upgrade to 10tb drives yet...

Using it primarily for dev and backup.

That's very interesting, thank you for replying. Do you work in media/video or such? 200 TB is a lot! Also unraid is interesting, for 30 storage devices it costs a one time fee of 120 dollars, is that correct?

Yeah, used to do a bunch of video for a side project, 4k video takes up a ton of space as it turns out.

And I do believe that's the cost for unraid, can't remember if that's what I paid.

If I had to build it again I'd probably go freenas.

This is the kind of thing that makes me think i’d Like to work at Backblaze even though I am not looking for a job.

They should have you log in to your Backblaze account and show you are a customer. :)

I just want to see a few blog posts next week and see what people do with them.

Hey @yev, can you ship me one?