> I'm curious, has anyone tried building one of these or know > of anyone who has?
a guy here built one, and it seems to behave fine. > Seems like a cheap solution for raw backup. "raw"? I think the backblaze (v1) is used for rsync-based incremental/nightly-snapshots. but yeah, this is a lot of space at the end of pretty narrow pipes. at some level, though, backblaze is a far more sensible response to disk prices than conventional vendors. 3TB disks start at $140! how much expensive infrastructure do you want to add to the disks to make the space usable? it's absurd to think of using fiberchannel, for instance. bigname vendors still try to tough it out by pretending that their sticker on commodity disks makes them worth hundreds of dollars more - I always figure this is more to justify charging thousands for, say, a 12-disk enclosure. backblaze's approach is pretty gung-ho, though. if I were trying to do storage at that scale, I'd definitely consider using fewer parts. for instance, an all-in-one motherboard with 6 sata ports and disks in a 1U chassis. BB winds up being about $44/disk overhead, and I think the simpler approach could come close, maybe $50/disk. then again, if you only look at asymptotics, USB enclosures knock it down to maybe $25/disk ;) _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
