A 3 TB hard drive version yielding 135 TB of raw capacity can be built for $7,567. In addition to helping to keep performance steady, reducing drive vibration can improve disk failure rates.Īll told, this 180 TB behemoth costs just under $11,000 to build with 4 TB hard drives. To that end each row of 15 drives now includes its own anti-vibration assembly intended to address this issue. With Pod 3.0, Backblaze has made improvements to the chassis with an eye toward reducing the vibration of the chassis. Any unexpected movement of a hard drive read or write head requires that drive to spin back around in order to correct the issue. It’s a known fact that physical vibration can be a performance killer.

Perhaps the most important part of the Pod, the chassis has undergone some refinements in Pod 3.0. For many, a SATA cable is a SATA cable, but for a company like Backblaze, a faulty SATA cable can be a really bad day for a customer, so everything is tested. For example, in Pod 3.0, Backblaze recommends the use of a specific brand of SATA cable. As such, the company is an authority on specific parts and whether or not parts work or don’t work. They do so in both lab and real world, mission-critical, customer-facing environments.

How do they do it? First of all, Backblaze has spent an incredible amount of time testing and validating every part that goes into their Pod architecture. That 6 cents per gigabyte includes all costs for the storage chassis, 45 x 4 TB hard drives, and all of the components and electronics that make the solution work its magic. This has allowed those requiring mass storage to rely on a proven architecture that’s used every day to support a profitable business.īackblaze recently released version 3.0 of their Pod architecture, which sports a whopping 180 TB of capacity in just a few rack units of space and at a cost of less than 6 cents per gigabyte.

Have you ever wondered how some online backup companies can afford to provide the services they provide at what seem to be insanely low prices? One company – Backblaze – has, for quite some time, made their hardware specifications freely available. How do they offer storage at such competitive prices? Here are some of the building blocks. Scott Lowe takes a look at the architecture of an online backup service. Look inside the Backblaze data center and its Pod 3.0 architecture

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