Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand drive crisis

Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by michaelt on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @09:10AM (#4631279)

A few months ago I wanted to buy 1000 Microsoft Lifecam Cinema HD webcams. I could order them individually from Amazon for £27 each with free delivery.

I phoned up all the official Microsoft distributors in my country, who phoned up Microsoft and whatnot. Not one of them could offer me a price below about £35. And getting in contact with Microsoft hardware directly? Ha, I should be so lucky.

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by andrewf on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @10:24AM (#4631632)

A few months ago I wanted to buy 1000 Microsoft Lifecam Cinema HD webcams.

I'll bite. Why? :)

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by michaelt on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @10:41AM (#4631743)

Asked to quote to make a system like [1] for a fleet of 1000 vans. Buying in USB cameras would reduce engineering costs compared to making our own. Eventually went for a brand that cost less and could accept wide angle lenses.

[1] http://www.smartdrive.net

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by corin_ on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @10:34AM (#4631695)

More often than not it's a case of who you know when it comes to stuff like this.

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by brianwski on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @02:33PM (#4633213)

(Backblaze engineer here.) We have been told that until we buy blocks of 10,000 drives, we cannot deal directly with the drive manufacturers. We're not there yet, thus we NORMALLY bid out each drive purchase (about one large order per month) to four or five regular "resellers" and "distributors" like CDW, Ingram, B&H, etc and take the best price that month. We were down at $90 or so for individual Hitachi 3 TBytes at the low point before the crisis. We're currently paying around $160 from CDW and friends and we can afford that without raising our prices. During the Thailand flood crisis, CDW offered "not enough drives" (half our order) for $350 per drive. We said "no", because we couldn't afford "yes". :-)

Anybody can win our business by under bidding the other resellers, and we're ALWAYS open to suggestions. If you know any way to achieve lower drive prices, let us know! PLEASE!!

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by zorlem on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @08:31AM (#4631116)

That's one of the things that caught my attention as well. It seems strange, I would've imagined that at 50TB/day (~500 x 3TB HDDs/month) they could get a nice deal with a direct importer. I guess there is a small PR twist to the whole story ;-) with newegg being a well-known name.

I don't know if the 50TB/day figure includes the replacement drives or only expanding the capacity as I guess their failure rate is quite high.

edit: fixed a typo.

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by bruceboughton on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @08:33AM (#4631122)

My guess would be that the 50TB/day figure is before de-duplication and not at all relevant to the actual storage, but even at 10% of that I would expect them to be sourcing them wholesale, not retail.

In fact, this whole article is making me doubt my faith in Backblaze as an off-site backup solution.

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by recuter on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @08:38AM (#4631152)

I remember a reddit AMA where they mentioned that they don't actually do any de-duplication. This isn't Dropbox and nowhere as reliable as S3 - its literally as if you're renting remote consumer external drives for offsite backup, for that usage pattern Backblaze makes some sense.

And those pods are cool. But I agree, a somewhat flawed approach.

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by zorlem on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @08:55AM (#4631217)

>This isn't Dropbox and nowhere as reliable as S3 - its literally as if you're renting remote consumer external drives for offsite backup

What are their reliability promises? I think that they're doing some mirroring of the data, but I'm still not sure about the rest of their service details.

I'm considering using them for backups, but have not decided yet.

I came upon this [1] discussion here, from 3 years ago. I'm diving in :)

Yeah, the pods are really sweet and they provide all the design documents [2]!

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803136

[2]: http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...

edit: added additional details about the design

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by setec on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @08:52AM (#4631206)

I don't think it should be assumed that there is no data redundancy between pods, afterall from prior blog posts it seems like the pods can be taken offline. I'd also posit that a properly constructed RAID array can mitigate the risks of using consumer parts; afterall that is the "I" in RAID.

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by mbell on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @09:00AM (#4631227)

NewEgg isn't just retail anymore. They have a 'NewEgg Business' program with pretty solid volume discounts.

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by polyfractal on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @08:29PM (#4634535)

I don't understand this comment at all. If anything, it has redoubled my interest in remaining a (paying) customer of BackBlaze. Look at the lengths they will go to securing drives so that I can continue to have stupid-cheap backup!

I can't ask for more.

And realistically, if push comes to shove, I'm sure BackBlaze would send out a heartfelt email to their loyal customers explaining the situation and kindly requesting a price increase. Especially after reading a post like the one they just submitted...I'm sure no one would have a problem ponying up a few more dollars.

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Re:Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand... by smackfu on Tuesday October 09, 2012 @08:46AM (#4631193)

Why not let NewEgg hold the inventory if their prices are good?

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