Maximum PC: Cloud backup company Backblaze has a secret and it's a big one. How big? Try an exabyte. That's how much data Backblaze hopes to be able to store at its relatively new data center in the Sacramento area. We didn't know about it because Backblaze never revealed any details about the facility until now. It's located just outside of Sacramento and away from any earthquake fault zones and flood plains.
After a short beta, Backblaze today opened up its new low-cost cloud storage service for all developers.
Maximum PC: If you're a regular reader of Maximum PC, then a name you're likely to remember is BackBlaze, a cloud-based backup firm that routinely shares its data about hard drive failures and various operations. The level of openness is pretty rare, as not too many companies offer the same level of transparency -- Puget Systems comes to mind -- and even fewer would splash the Internet with raw data. Well, that's what BlackBlaze just did, offering up raw data collected from more than 41,000 disk drives in its data center.
Maximum PC: Cloud backup firm BackBlaze has posted some interesting data over the course of the past couple of months, including one in which the company talked about estimating the life expectancy of hard drives. Turns out such a task is tricky business even for a firm that keeps over 25,000 HDDs spinning at all times. BackBlaze also posted data suggesting that enterprise drives might actually be less reliable than consumer HDDs, but neither study really answered the question the company is most frequently asked -- which drive should a consumer buy? If failure rate is the only concern, BackBlaze says Hitachi is the most reliable HDD brand around.
"By the end of 2013, BackBlaze had 27,134 consumer grade drives spinning in its storage pods."
There you go. Consumer Grade. I don't buy consumer grade Western Digital or Seagate. I buy the server/professional grade stuff and have never had issues.
If you have a system that is on 24/7 (or close to it) no consumer grade drive will EVER take the stress. Spend a little extra on your hard drive in the beginning and you'll end up spending less over the long run.
There is a reason the professional grade stuff has a 3-5 year warranty and the consumer stuff only has 1-2 years.
that's a lot of space