Backblaze now lends you a hard drive to get your data back

Backblaze is an online cloud backup service that allows you to keep your entire data safe (unlimited storage) for $5 per month, and now it makes it even easier to get your data back by lending you an hard drive to speed up the data recovery process.

What are the most reliable Hard Drives?

Needing to buy an extra hard drive to keep your backups safe? But there are so many... which hard drive should you buy? Well, the guy at the store will try to sell you the one he has on stock; your "computer geek" friends will give you their own opinion (valuable nonetheless) based on the dozens - or even hundreds - of drives they've used along the years; and then... you have companies like Backblaze, using over 25 thousand drives, and sharing their findings with us.


A while back they've shared statistics about how long hard drives kept working in their storage pods - and now they share with us which of the major three brands: Seagate, WD, and Hitachi fares better than the rest. All in all it all boils down to which hard drive should you buy to keep you data safe?

And the answer is Hitachi, closely followed by WD (keep in mind WD has acquired Hitachi's hard drive divison, so, we'll need to see how things evolve) and last - and with much scarier failure rates - Seagate.

While Hitachi hard drives hover around a 1% annual failure rate, WD drives stay at around 3%. Seagate 1.5 and 3TB hard drives on the other hand, have have much higher failure rates (14 and 9%!), Only the 4TB Seagate drive stays relatively competitive with WD drives, but even so it still had double the failure rate of a similar Hitachi 4TB drive.

So... next time you're choosing which hard drive you should buy to keep your digital data safe... who're you going to trust? (Although keep in mind that the usage patterns in a Blackblaze storage pod will not be the same as a domestic scenario - but in any case, if they fare well under such extreme conditions, they're bound to do equally well in a less strenuous environment. And last but not least, you should be be using a SSD as your main hard drive by now, using these magnetic disks as secondary storage for large files and backups only.)

Low Cost Petabyte Storage

In a time where I - myself - am still looking for a reliable, simple, and cheap way to keep my data safe (my main computer crashed a few days ago, and I'm still painstakingly slowly recovering data from it) this blog post jumped to my attention: talking about BackBlaze solutions to its large-scale storage needs.

To start with, lets analyze how much a petabytes costs these days (if you don't know what a petabyte is, its 1000 Terabytes, and 1TB equals 1 Gigabyte; to put it in perspective, 1PB equals about 227 thousand DVD-R discs.)

As you can see, the cost difference between the raw hard drives and what most companies charge you is substantial - which is why BackBlaze decided to build their own storage solution (just like Google does) and now shares their secrets with all of us.

The solution they come up with is their BackBlaze PODs, each holding 67TB and costing just $7,687.

The access to all this data is done - not via iSCSI, NFS, SQL, or Fibre Channel - but *exclusively* via HTTPS.

For all the details and a complete hardware and price list for these pods be sure to read the full post on how to build a petabyte storage solution at low cost.



I wouldn't need that many space for myself... but I'm glad they decided to share it with us so we can use some of their ideas. :)