News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage by dabeeeenster on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @11:42AM (#798188)
What happens when one of the PSU's fails catastrophically, pushing a big electrical surge through the hard disks, frying half of them?

I didn't see anything in here that discusses that eventuality? And when you have that many servers, it IS going to happen at some point...

Re:Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage by papercrane on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @12:00PM (#798222)
It's addressed in the section "A Backblaze Storage Pod is a Building Block"

From the article:

When you run a datacenter with thousands of hard drives, CPUs, motherboards, and power supplies, you are going to have hardware failures it’s irrefutable. Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesn’t allow for a single point of failure.

Re:Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage by dabeeeenster on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @12:22PM (#798263)
Sounds to me like they haven't implemented this yet. I wouldn't want my data on that sort of solution. Backed up data would surely need a level of geographic redundancy.
Re:Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage by papercrane on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @12:54PM (#798348)
In the next section they say they have implemented the machine level redundancy. As for geographic redundancy I think the idea is that you use them for that. As in you backup your data locally and then send it to them as a redundant copy.
Re:Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage by notaddicted on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @11:57AM (#798217)
It is called a fuse.
Re:Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage by ars on Tuesday September 01, 2009 @04:28PM (#798855)
To get all the various logos and certifications on them, they are required not to do that. Every line is voltage limited.