Petabytové úložiště za rozumnou cenu

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Done.

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Pardon za neznalost ale co je na tom tak revolucne?

The rain started in August and by mid-October 2011, violent floods in Thailand had crippled the factories that helped produce nearly half of the world’s hard drives. As an online backup company, Backblaze fills more than 50 TB of new drives every day. To survive this crisis without raising prices or compromising service, Backblaze deployed every last employee, as well as friends and family, to acquire drives in what became known internally as “drive farming”. What follows is how we did it.

The going rate for a 3TB external drive at Costco or Best Buy was $169. Internal drives, like those inside your computer and the ones we typically use in our storage pods, were at least $100 more and were becoming nearly impossible to find, having been bought by HP, Apple and Dell for their systems. Our “choice” to use external drives meant they had to be “shucked” – a process where the internal drive is removed from its case – before being deployed into a Backblaze storage pod. In addition to the price of the drive there were now extra costs to shuck the drives, extra costs to recycle the shucked parts, and once shucked we couldn’t return a bad drive, but it was still less expensive than buying internal drives even if we could find them. Problem solved, Costco here we come.

Drive farming continued throughout January and into mid-February of 2012. By then we had farmed 5.5 Petabytes of data storage. Eventually smaller distributors and resellers appeared offering decent prices on internal drives – no more shucking. Throughout the crisis, we didn’t raise our prices, we continued our policy of unlimited storage, and we didn’t throttle our customers’ backup speeds. Prices have slowly decreased over the past several months as Thailand has gotten back on its feet and production shifted to other factories. We recently purchased another 2,000 internal drives to add to our stockpile. Lower prices are nice.

On July 25th of this year, Backblaze took $5M in venture funding. At the same time, Costco was offering 3TB external drives for $129 about $30 less than we could get for internal drives. The limit was five drives per person. Needless to say, it was a deal we couldn’t refuse. Old habits die hard.