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BackBlaze's business concern is selling online fill-in solutions, but it has likewise been and then kind every bit to release information on hard drive failure rates and the design/specs of its storage hardware. Today is a big day for BackBlaze as it'due south announcing a new version of its 4U rack-mounted storage pods. The Storage Pod 5.0 crams an astonishing 480TB into a single 4U case. This makes BackBlaze's online storage platform more efficient, just you can besides buy a Storage Pod 6.0 of your very own if you've got the cash.

The first Storage Pod pattern was appear and released back in 2009. It consisted of 45 hard drives at the maximum mainstream capacity available at the time, a mere 1.5TB. All told, the Storage Pod 1.0 could hold 67.5TB of data. BackBlaze has been working always since to increment the capacity of its pods without expanding the footprint. The Storage Pod 6.0 can conform lx drives, an entire extra 15-drive row compared with past 45-drive designs. It hits the theoretical 480TB ceiling by taking advantage of the latest 8TB drives.

BackBlaze did have to make a few sacrifices to go to this signal. A standard 4U instance is 29-inches deep, but the Storage Pod 6.0 is longer at a piddling over 35-inches. It'll fit fine in an open rack, but it's not like yous desire to put a door on it anyway with all those hard drives gasping for air. It still runs on the same Ivy Bridge Xeon and 32GB of RAM every bit previous pods.

BackBlaze itself doesn't sell the pods, merely the blueprint is freely available with CAD files and parts lists. It recommends Backuppods as a good source of the same hardware it uses if you want your ain pod. Backuppods volition shortly offer the Storage Pod 6.0 assembled for $5,950 sans drives. BackBlaze was kind plenty to break down exactly how much information technology will cost you to assemble your own backup pod with various drives.

The near cost-constructive general apply configuration has threescore 4TB Seagate drives for a total capacity of 240TB and a cost of $ten,364. BackBlaze is pretty proud of the per gigabyte price of this configuration, which is simply $0.043/GB. With 8TB drives the total cost is $22,595, but that's but $0.047 per gigabyte. If you want the all-time bang for your buck and don't mind using slower archival drives, an array of 8TB Seagate SMR drives (480TB) works out to $16,364 for a price of $0.034 per gigabyte.

Odds are you probably don't need a 4U Storage Pod with nearly half a petabyte of storage, but there are people who exercise. Or at least they remember they do. Either manner, now they've got an option.