DISQUS

VentureBeat: Backblaze sets its cheap storage designs free

  • Eldon Hoke · 3 months ago
    If you check out their design, you'll notice that they use a horrible piece of hardware known as a SATA Multiplier. This device allows you to plug more than one drive into a single SATA channel. These devices are not terribly reliable, and when one fails, guess what - 5 drives fall off the machine at once causing the RAID to become unusable. Yeah, I want to store data with these geniuses...

    Seriously, grow some clue here...
  • murkymark · 3 months ago
    Grow some clue? Don't you mean get a clue? I've heard of grow some balls. But grow some clue? Sounds like you need to grow some clue with the language you attempt to speak in.
  • Name · 3 months ago
    @Eldon

    Please add a site to back up your claim about sata multiplier not being reliable, otherwise your example is too general about one failing. It's no different than a hardware raid controller failing. So that platitude is quite useless.
  • Raj · 3 months ago
    Not sure about the other vendors, but to compare EMC Celerra to Amazon S3 using almost any metric results in a flawed comparison. They're two different beasts entirely. Both are great for different things, but not interchangeable in the least.
  • hrs2423 · 3 months ago
    Take this interesting piece of hardware and add the free ZFS file system (from SUN/Oracle) and you have resiliency and a very low cost. While you might not want this as the primary host for a transaction based system, it would be fine for archive of data. ZFS give you SAN like features and file block redundancy so that even when drives and controllers fail you can still recover. We know they will fail. This is just a component in an architecture that could be used very cleverly if given some thought.