The basic premise is to achieve the highest drive density at the lowest cost possible. This is significantly lower than traditional enterprise solutions from vendors such as EMC, IBM and NetApp that often cost several times as much to connect per drive. The impact is that Backblaze is able to add drives to its network for approximately $44/ drive. The company is now on their (at least) third major revision of the chassis which you can learn about here: Backblaze Storage Pod (previous generation) Instead of going this route Backblaze built its own storage “pods” capable of holding 180TB of storage in a system that costs under $2,000 excluding the cost of 45 drives.

Although heavily discounted (oftentimes upward of 60%) list prices for 1PB of enterprise storage in 2010-2011 were in the $1 million range. Enterprise storage is anything but inexpensive. Namely the cost of hard drives rose significantly after the Thailand flooding and the Western Digital – Hitachi and Seagate – Samsung mergers and some of the venture capital money started to wane as several players got securely established.īackblaze took a somewhat different approach to its competitors insofar as it built its own low cost storage infrastructure. There was a time when it appeared as though backup was heading to this type of model but a few things happened. While many other vendors offer cloud storage other major vendors (Box, Dropbox, Mozy, Google and Amazon for example) do not offer unlimited storage, especially at $5/ month. That makes it one of the larger published reports of hard drive availability that we have read to date.Īs a brief recap, Backblaze is a company that offers unlimited backup for $5/month. Backblaze finally released that information In a piece titled: What hard drive should I buy? The study is significant in that the company employs 27,134 consumer grade hard drives. We covered that Storage Reliability Figures from Backblaze release and one of the biggest questions was: aggregate numbers are great, but which hard drive manufacturer worked best. Backblaze recently released results of its hard drive reliability study.

Blaze hard drive reliability