How To Add 5.5 Petabytes and Get Banned From Costco 273
concealment writes with this extract from GigaOm: "'We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.' Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year. Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army."
Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
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Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Website says $3.96/m for unlimited data. Something tells me this business model will not survive without some serious bandwidth limitations. After all, if you upload is limited to 100mb then you ability to (non commercially) fill Terabytes of data is limited.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Website says $3.96/m for unlimited data.
Something tells me this business model will not survive without some serious bandwidth limitations. After all, if you upload is limited to 100mb then you ability to (non commercially) fill Terabytes of data is limited.
My impression(from friends who use them) is that they aim pretty heavily at home-user backup scenarios who are likely to be comparatively light users and have severely limited upstream bandwidth. They also don't do Big Serious SLAs and similar. Nor do they support things like backing up mounted NAS volumes or non Windows/OSX systems(I haven't check to see if the client is smart enough to recognize a mounted iSCSI device... It isn't exactly rocket surgery to distinguish a block device hanging from the Windows iSCSI initiatior from a block device hanging off the Intel whateverchipset SATA 2 port; but if you go with 'NAS = SMB/AFP" you'd miss it.
Still, convenient and cheap, if not as robust as solutions that cost more.
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There was a photographer who wanted to backup terabytes of data, and they told him, sure. go ahead.
Ob python (Score:4, Funny)
photography eh?
Nudge, Nudge, wink wink
Say no more
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basically that's what they said. They asked him to stagger it over a period of a couple of months, but told him - $5/month, not a problem.
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I'm a photographer as well and I use Crashplan (they supported linux) and they're priced similarly (even cheaper I think). The application they provide
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a RED camera which shoots 18megapixel raw photos at 24+ frames per second. Backblaze hasn't throttled me at all and I have 20mbps upload speeds.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Funny)
Indeed. here's an article about some rocket surgeons [thefabricator.com].
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Website says that $5 with discounts for paying in advance. Though I'm sure you're right about bandwidth limitations.
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a) How much data do you really have?
b) How much of it can be de-duplicated (they do data-center wide de-duplication)
c) What is your upload speed?
Realistically and I am a heavy geek user have:
a) about 2TB (costs about $250 / 3 years today or $7/mo)
b) around 18% (ZFS tells me so)
c) 1Mbps
Realistically most users have
a) around 50GB (at the $250 for 2TB cost this is about $7 for the whole 3 years)
b) around 25% (ZFS tells me so at work for ~300 home directories)
c) 1Mbps or less
So for the average user, the build c
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Run the numbers. 50 TB a day sounds like a lot, if they've only got one customer. But they're probably got "a zillion" which would imply your very thin slice of the upload bandwidth is going to be choked to like a gig per day. The upgrade in my basement from (full) 1 TB drives to 2 TB drives took around overnight, less than 24 hours anyway, but over the net at a gig per day would be about 3 years to fully convert. Even if they're not limited I would have serious problems shoving more than 100 gigs/day thru my cablemodem, so thats at least 10 days.
Another interesting thing to analyze is $5/month is $60/yr, so subtract $5/yr for electricity to spin a drive, assume a drive lives 2 years (probably much longer) that means if you can buy a drive big enough to hold everything you want for less than $110, just stick a drive in your basement. Better bandwidth and latency too, I have gigE at home but only ten or so megs of cablemodem. $110 at tiger direct will get me 2 TB. So 2 TB is approximately the tipping point, use less and you're better off "self hosting" in the basement, use more and you're better off using their service (and they're likely losing money if you use more than 2 TB).
Also I'm curious if its "unlimited" like cellphone or internet access is "unlimited" in other words they'll cut you off if they're losing money on you.
House burns down? (Score:5, Insightful)
A backup in your basement does nothing for you if your house burns down/gets flooded/has a catastrophic power surge/whatever.
Where else can you backup offsite?
--PM
Re:House burns down? (Score:5, Funny)
I would say at your parent's house but this being slashdot that's probably not offsite.
Re:House burns down? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would say at your parent's house
That's exactly what I've done. I set up some scripts to rsync data from my computer to a server in my mum's garage, and also the reverse.
That way, we both have important data (mostly photos) backed up off-site in different cities, and the photos are available to browse through a web interface.
but this being slashdot that's probably not offsite.
A friend went with an encrypted backup program, and set up more-or-less the same thing with another friend.
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How about a neighbor. You could host a drive for them, they host one for you. Cheap wifi network connecting the drives to your networks. Encrypt everything you backup. You each have an offsite backup with reasonably fast connections.
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Re:House burns down? (Score:5, Insightful)
Safe Deposit Box.
I have 3 drives (that are archive only, not OS), 2 in my PC and 1 in my bank. Every couple weeks or so I take one out of my PC & swap it at the bank & update the bank's drive to mirror the one still in my PC. Cost is ~30/yr for the box except that I already had it for documents anyway (so no adtl cost to me).
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I'm actually on CrashPlan which also offer unlimmitted, they haven't complained yet for about a TB of data. All you calculations are good, I have onsite backup as well, but I have digital photos of family/freinds for about the last 10 years which are about 150GB and then bought a 1080p camcorder about 4 years ago and that footage is already in excess of 500GB. So I really wanted an offsite backup to go along with backup on my NAS. 4 years of unlimitted storage costed me about $140 bucks. I am fortuante to h
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Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Run the numbers. 50 TB a day sounds like a lot, if they've only got one customer. But they're probably got "a zillion" which would imply your very thin slice of the upload bandwidth is going to be choked to like a gig per day. The upgrade in my basement from (full) 1 TB drives to 2 TB drives took around overnight, less than 24 hours anyway, but over the net at a gig per day would be about 3 years to fully convert. Even if they're not limited I would have serious problems shoving more than 100 gigs/day thru my cablemodem, so thats at least 10 days.
Another interesting thing to analyze is $5/month is $60/yr, so subtract $5/yr for electricity to spin a drive, assume a drive lives 2 years (probably much longer) that means if you can buy a drive big enough to hold everything you want for less than $110, just stick a drive in your basement. Better bandwidth and latency too, I have gigE at home but only ten or so megs of cablemodem. $110 at tiger direct will get me 2 TB. So 2 TB is approximately the tipping point, use less and you're better off "self hosting" in the basement, use more and you're better off using their service (and they're likely losing money if you use more than 2 TB).
Also I'm curious if its "unlimited" like cellphone or internet access is "unlimited" in other words they'll cut you off if they're losing money on you.
The number I am looking at is 50TB/day means 578MB/sec all day and all night (i am presuming there is some amount of day/night load curve). That's a lot of bandwidth for one organization.
But more practically, what are you doing to generate all that content? Even a serious photographer/videographer would be hard pressed to generate more than 10GB of backup-worthy content a day, especially not averaged over a whole week or month.
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Everything is backup worthy when it's unlimited storage at a fixed price.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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They have some kind of cap/quota concept, as well as a maximum amount of transfer per a specific amount of time.
It's the not quite unlimited kind of "calling it unlimited anyway".
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That's fine, as long as you don't care whether your data is still there when you need to restore it. These guys are cheap because they're bucking the trend toward cloud storage for big data. Instead they're building their own "pods". Anybody who's doing manufacturing on that kind of scale needs to be a lot better at supply chain manageent. If they screw up something so central to their business model, what else might they screw up? How much redundancy do they offer? How glitchy are these home-brew NAS devic
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Your NAS will cost more than $4 in electricity per month.
Not for a home NAS.
A monthly increment of $4 on a typical US utility bill is equal to about 29½kWh of energy usage (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [bls.gov], the average in the US was $0.135/kWh in summer 2012). Consider a Synology DS213 [synology.com] with 8TB in two disks. Even if the disks were perpetually spinning, it would consume 13kWh per month. If the disks were spun down the whole time, usage would be 6kWh per month. In fact, the disks spend the vast majority of the time spun down, so the energy usage
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Can't they just... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Seriously. It was so bad the people who make the harddrives couldn't even buy them, from themselves at full price.
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Obviously the answers are no and yes. They are likely way to small to buy direct and 1) get a good price and 2) even be given the time of day.
Re:Can't they just... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can't they just... (Score:4, Interesting)
Costco gets such a good deal by buying in massive lots and handling distribution themselves that in fact it is worth the actual cost. I've been a costco customer off and on over the last few years and by remarkable non-coincidence I pretty much always check HDD prices. As well, I bought a pair of 1TB MyBooks when they were the big disk that Costco sold, and more recently I've bought a pair of 3TB GoFlexes. I like the return policy, and I can back up one disk to another (I disco the backup) and the two disks have very different service profiles so they're not entirely likely to die at the same time. And the prices were significantly lower than anything I could find from an even vaguely reputable retailer online.
People have complained bitterly about how hard it supposedly is to get a disk out of a MyBook, I've never tried. I don't know anything at all about how hard it is to get the disk out of a GoFlex enclosure. But I do know that until very recently the prices on these external disks were actually better than buying internal disks online. I know (personally) a couple of people who went that route when building a desktop system, decasing externals from costco.
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Count me in as having done this. TigerDirect had a 3TB external drive for $40 less than the internals! It was an absolute no-brainer to buy it and decase it. Sure, there's no warranty, but it's worth the risk to save $40 since hard drives rarely fail and when they do it's usually after a few years when you should be retiring them anyway.
The case was a really shitty USB-only case, too, which was such a data bottleneck on the internal SATA drive that it would have been a colossal pain to use it as an external
Re:Can't they just... (Score:5, Informative)
some hard drives (western digital, iirc) are now sold without the sata interface on the drive itself, for external models.
you rip it apart, and find out that you can't stick it onto a sata port...
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If not SATA, then what interface do they use?
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Not my pictures, just the first thing that poped up on GIS: http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f16/damaged-micro-usb-soldered-on-wd-elements-se-1tb-external-635019.html [techsupportforum.com]
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There we floods in thailand which significantly reduced the supply of hard drives. Some vendors responded to this by imposing buying restrictions, some imposed caps on the number of drives that could be bought. Many did both.
You would think that vendors would try and get as much money as they can for their stock and to an extent that is true. However for something like hard drives the picture is more complicated. If someone can't buy a hard drive at a price they consider reasonable they won't buy the rest o
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Good idea, but here's the problem. Even the chain suppliers like Ingram Micro, Supercom and so on didn't have any supply to sell during the shortage. That's why companies had to get creative to find a new supply of drives. When wholesalers don't have any supply for you, you need to find other places who have a supply and buy them anyway you can if you need them.
Our shop was buying them in bulk from Walmart, Bestbuy/Futureshop here in Canada. Because we couldn't get any through our normal supply chain.
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Another modded Insightful comment for someone who didn't read even the first paragraph of the corresponding article...
interesting. (Score:2)
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There's a link in TFA to an older article about them starting up and how much it costs them to run their storage: apparently it costs them $94,563 for hardware, space and power for a petabyte over 3 years. That's about $0.0026 per gigabyte per month, so if users are charged $5 per month then they just have to gamble that the average user is going to use less than about 1.9 terabytes per month.
Obviously that doesn't include a lot of other stuff like wages, but you're still gambling that a user isn't gonna
What a bunch of douche bags (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, what a bunch of assholes.
So instead of doing the capitalistic thing and gouging with insanely high prices, the shops instead started rationing drives for a sane price so everyone could get a little bit of the very limited supply.
That was actually a really good thing to do. Instead of profiteering, they tried to make the best of a bad situation for everyone.
Then a bunch of dicks like this figure that they're more important than everyone else and that they should be able to get more than enyone else.
Selfish bastards. Nothing but scum.
After reading this I will not be giving them my money.
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Pretty much.
Besides that, anyone that thinks they can run a company with this business model and survive is a business moron, or a scam artist trying to make a quick buck. This is 90's dotcom level idiocy at it's finest. Unlimited storage for $5/mo? Unlimited bandwidth too I guess? Completely 100% unsustainable.
So I would expect slimy people like this to pull stuff like trying to scam more quantities of hardware than allowed. Getting friends and family to buy stuff? Uh, did you have them on payroll?
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Besides that, anyone that thinks they can run a company with this business model and survive is a business moron, or a scam artist trying to make a quick buck. This is 90's dotcom level idiocy at it's finest. Unlimited storage for $5/mo? Unlimited bandwidth too I guess? Completely 100% unsustainable.
Seems like it's you that's the business moron, as they're actually profitable. And until that $5M funding they got this year, they had been growing entirely through that profit. You can find all the details on their blog somewhere.
Also, they're not the only ones to do this. There's also CrashPlan (and others I assume) that offer essentially the same thing at about the same price.
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I would be very suspicious of a company whose business model depends on them getting a bunch of friends and relatives to buy as many hard drives as they can from Costco.
WTF!!!
If BackBlaze is a legitimate company that needs a lot of hard drives, why can't they just buy them from the various distributors/wholesalers. Where do you think Costco gets their drives.
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It doesn't.
When there was a temporary disruption of hard drive supply chains, they noticed that external drives could be bought at costco for significantly cheaper than they could get internal drives from distributors/wholesalers. So they did.
And they get a bunch of free advertising on slahdot out of writing about it too.
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It's perfectly sustainable. Their customers will use more and more storage as storage prices fall, and coincidentally they'll be able to buy the additional storage to back it up since prices will have fallen for them too.
Yes they will lose money on some customers. As long as there are enough customers they make money on that's to cover it that doesn't matter. Every "all you can eat buffet" is making the same bet.
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, what a bunch of assholes.
So instead of doing the capitalistic thing and gouging with insanely high prices, the shops instead started rationing drives for a sane price so everyone could get a little bit of the very limited supply.
That was actually a really good thing to do. Instead of profiteering, they tried to make the best of a bad situation for everyone.
Then a bunch of dicks like this figure that they're more important than everyone else and that they should be able to get more than enyone else.
Selfish bastards. Nothing but scum.
After reading this I will not be giving them my money.
The hard drive sellers weren't doing this altruistically. They made their call, figuring that rationing drives was the best for their businesses and best fulfilled their duty to their shareholders.
The cloud storage company also did what they thought best benefited their business and fulfilled their duty to shareholders/backers/etc.
It does not benefit us as individuals to assign a moral motive to the actions of a company. Whatever they do, it's for a business purpose. If it seems like one company is the good guy, it's just that that's what they think will help them return value to the owners. We must realize that they are all "selfish bastards" by the very nature of the capitalist system and not be fooled into personifying them.
What I've written in no way implies that you can't spend your money wherever you want -- or withhold it -- based on anything you want to base it on. If you find a business' actions to be detrimental to society or just contrary to your ideals, you can certainly boycott them. In fact, I think you should boycott if you feel as strongly as you appear to. In this way -- if you're not alone -- those actions on the part of the company may turn out not to benefit the shareholders and therefore force them to change.
You could also pursue a legislative approach, maybe convince your representatives that legal rationing is in the public interest. The US rationed commodities during wartime before, perhaps you can appeal that adequate storage space for all is sufficiently important for legal intervention.
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:4, Insightful)
The hard drive sellers weren't doing this altruistically. They made their call, figuring that rationing drives was the best for their businesses and best fulfilled their duty to their shareholders.
they almost certainly could have got away with upping the prices by much more than they did. They chose strict rationing instead.
It does not benefit us as individuals to assign a moral motive to the actions of a company. Whatever they do, it's for a business purpose.
And this is a real problem. They're just Soylent Corporations: made of people. It's the people that act. Pretending otherwise is an attempt to justify imorral action.
Taking that to its illoigcal conclusion could lead to hypotheticals like
Well, it's OK that they kidnapped babies, murdered them and sold them for dog food. It was a really cheap source of meat and so the profit margin was immense. Excellent for business.
We must realize that they are all "selfish bastards" by the very nature of the capitalist system and not be fooled into personifying them.
No: you have been fooled into believeing that companies act independent of people. They do not and they cannot. Only people can act and people can and do choose to do immoral things for money.
The fact that they're doing it for money is no justification whatsoever.
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This would be true if companies were manned by robots, but they aren't. A company is just a lot of human be
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Not to mention that this was also during the busy holiday season, to hard drives were going to sell no matter what as they got gobbled up as presents. Costco decided it would be bet
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That was actually a really good thing to do. Instead of profiteering, they tried to make the best of a bad situation for everyone.
Uh, no. It would be a really stupid thing to do.
Raising prices means that people who don't really need a drive right now wait for prices to drop, so the users who are willing to pay the higher prices to fulfill real needs can still buy theirs. Rationing means that a company which needs drives today in order to grow its business can't buy them because they're being sold below market price to Joe Sixpack who wants a bigger drive to store more downloaded pr0n.
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Being able to outbid Joe does not mean that you need the hard drive more than him, it just means t
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You now have a new fan. I wish more people thought like you and considered what they SHOULD do, ethically, in priority of what's merely LEGAL (or not legal as the case may be). If more people thought like you, then we'd have fewer stupid laws restricting everyone's freedoms on the basis of the selfishness of a few. Thank you for existing and having the willingness to point out that just because something's allowed doesn't mean it's right or doesn't have consequences for other people.
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Does anyone know anybody that wasn't able to buy a 3TB hard drive at retail due to BackBlaze's purchases?
Err... how would you know?
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:5, Insightful)
BackBlaze did what they should have done: solve the business problem at hand.
Ah, choice use of the word "business". That must mean that it's OK to suspend all morals as long as it's "business".
Basically no.
BlackBlaze did nothing. Do not pretentd otherwise by using the word "business" to hide the acts of individuals.
The _people_ at balckblaze figured that they they would be selfish and put their needs above the needs of everyone else. That's selfish, douchebaggy behaviour.
One that Costco, by not gouging with insane prices, wasn't engaing in.
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, I wouldn't think twice about doing the same thing. They are purchasing the drives, not stealing them. For "some reason" costco is buying them in lots where they can distribute them at that price. I guess they were just leveraging Costco and Best Buy's buying power to keep their business afloat.
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still doesn't change this:
. That's selfish, douchebaggy behaviour.
The fact that you would do it only means you are a selfish douchbag.
no one said it was theft, so don't bring up that strawman.
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, that -is- how it works, sadly... Great quote from this season of Leverage:
"I mean, you and I kill a guy, we go to prison... my company kills a guy, we pay a fine."
Re:What a bunch of douche bags (Score:4, Interesting)
The magic of Adverse Selection, when you discover the Golden Rule has a discount rate...
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If Costco was a government entity this argument would make sense.
As it is Costco is a retailer; retailers are at liberty in an open economy to impose whatever conditions on a sale they please, buyers accept these conditions, and free exchange happens.
Costco's interest is in keeping as many customers as possible coming to their store, by maintaining an inventory at all times. If their entire inventory is bought up by CloudBackupInc on the first day, Costco is definitely hurt by that, because their business
Skip the blogspam (Score:5, Informative)
Hear the story direct from Backblaze [backblaze.com] (bonus: goes into more detail).
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I like how they link to the article about how they build up their pods. Really cool info for the novice storage builder trying to put something similar together for their small enterprise. Enough information to get you going, enough redacted so that you actually have to DIY.
I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?
I can't think of many good reasons that they would look at customers coming in and buying assloads of their merchandise and say "NO! Get out of here and don't buy stuff from us ever again!"
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe they just wanted to prevent racketeering: a company buying up a temporarily rare commodity (making it even rarer) and reselling at a huge mark-up. Maybe Costco thought this unregulated free market needed some self regulation to help it remain healthy.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?
I can't think of many good reasons that they would look at customers coming in and buying assloads of their merchandise and say "NO! Get out of here and don't buy stuff from us ever again!"
A valid question, but one which some logical thought should provide an answer to... I'd suspect Costco prefers to have many content customers (a customer who ends up at an empty shelf every day is going to go elsewhere, potentially even for other stuff) than one deliriously happy customer. The profit margins on those things are going to be minor anyway, so its not Costco were raking in the profits by selling all their harddrive stock. Presumably, this added profit did not offset all the other customers being unhappy with Costco that they couldnt buy they harddrives they advertise.
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'd suspect Costco prefers to have many content customers (a customer who ends up at an empty shelf every day is going to go elsewhere, potentially even for other stuff) than one deliriously happy customer.
Costco is notorious for getting a container load of something and putting it up on the shelves until it runs out. And then never carrying it again.
Supposedly, they cater to small businesses who need a consistent supply of certain items. Think of a restaurant putting something on their menu based on ingredient availability. Unless its their Kirkland brand whatever, their selection is inconsistent.
Costco doesn't make money on product (Score:3)
Costco has a corporate policy that limits revenue from sales to 10% above their cost. This 10% covers their overhead costs (buildings,employees, distribution, etc). 100% of Costco's profit comes from their membership fees. Depending on the amount of fuel sold per quarter they may turn a very small profit on this 10% or they might not.
Costco has NO profit incentive to sell one customer more of a product if that means pissing off other customers. Their profits come almost exclusively from membership fees, hen
Almost, but not quite... (Score:3)
Costco generally limits markup to 15%, not 10%. Also, certain state laws require that Costco apply minimum markups to the selling prices for specific goods, such as tobacco products, alcoholic beverages, and gasoline. Of course, some products are marked down for quick sale. However, the resultant average gross margin target is around 10%.
They do, however, attempt to control their SG&A (overhead) to match their gross margin target of 10%. The net corporate profit is from membership fees which is why
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Costco works to keep prices low by buying in huge quantity and never marking up any product more than 15 percent, less than the typical 25 percent at a supermarket or 50 percent at a department store. Costco makes up for those low margins by charging a $55 annual membership fee of its 64 million members. With more than 90 percent of its members renewing each year, the fee is evidently not a significant deterrent.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?
There's a difference between selling at a loss, and selling below market value. For instance, if Costco signs a contract for delivery of a million drives in Feburary, the factory floods in March, and Costco gets delivery in April, their drives are suddenly worth substantially more. They can either sell them at the previously intended prices, or they can raise prices to market value. In the first case they still sell them for more than they paid, but less than market value. In the second case, they take the customer for all they're worth, and make much more profit. Rationing is the only way the first one can work, otherwise someone will come in and buy all your drives, then resell them at market value.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Funny)
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It was not that the drives they had were more expensive for them to purchase it was just that they could not get very many of them.
So they limited how much each person could buy instead of profiteering and raising prices so only the rich could afford them.
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There was a delay in the pipeline. Like, all factories shut down due to natural disaster (Tsunami). Therefore, Costco (due to buying in bulk) and a few others had a supply that had to be stretched. Instead of raising rates to match the new supply with demand, they imposed caps on how many each customer could buy. Many other companies did so as well (Newegg for instance).
Now that the supply line has been
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There was a flood in thailand, this meant supplies of hard drives were massively reduced. Stockists of hard drives were left with three choices.
1: Crank up the price until demand came down to meet supply
2: Put restrictions in place to stop one customer buying too many, possiblly in combination with smaller price increases.
3: Do nothing
Whichever choice is taken some customers will be pissed off. Choice 1 is likely to be the most profitable if only hard drive profits are looked at. However if people consider
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I don't know what the case was with Cosco in this instance, but sometimes it's better business to please many customers with small orders than to please 1 customer with a huge order. Even if it comes out to selling more drives in the short term, if it means developing a reputation from your regular customers for not having what they need, it may not be good for business to sell out.
3.96$ a month... (Score:4, Interesting)
... is pretty cheap (5$ is for a family account). But as BB itself says, you can only upload 2 to 4 GB per day.
They should be making a mint on that service! They use home-brew storage pods and are very open about it, too!
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/ [backblaze.com]
Anyway, be careful to read all the gotchas:
http://www.backblaze.com/remote-backup-everything.html [backblaze.com] (hint: 'everything' for a certain definition of everything. No virtual machines, ISO's and NAS storage by default.)
http://www.backblaze.com/internet-backup.html [backblaze.com] (hint: not all OSes are treated equally.)
(Full disclosure: I work for a storage manufacturer that sells de-duping storage so I think I understand their cost model a bit better than most.)
Internet Archive (Score:5, Informative)
Several months ago I met someone from the Internet Archive (archive.org) who told a similar story. The weren't expanding their storage at the same pace as Backblaze, but they were also resorting to shucking external drives to build their rack mounted servers.
Makes no sense (Score:2)
The whole concept of online file storage makes no sense. Especially for consumes and especially in the U.S. where speeds are slow and costs are high. Getting your data into the "cloud" is extremely slow due to the fact that all ISPs severely restrict upload speeds. Then, once you finally get it all uploaded, getting it back will be difficult, even if you are fortunate enough to live in an area with decent speed, because you are probably one of the many millions of people whose only choice for broadband i
Re: (Score:2)
What happens to your data when your office/house/whatever with the 2 or 3 TB drives burns down with them in it, or someone breaks in and steals your desktop and the USB drive you left sitting on top of it?
Depending on the circumstances, I usually recommend RAID of some kind if possible, a USB/External Hard Drive on-site, and then some kind of off-site backup.
If your internal drive dies, if you had RAID, you just replace the dead drive.
They Open Sourced their Hardware (Score:2)
If you're interested, they open sourced their hardware a few years ago.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ [backblaze.com]
Banned at Best Buy (Score:2)
More of a feature than a bug.
Actually banned from a retailer? (Score:2)
Re:All on consumer grade drives..... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah. I'll bet they're not even using oxygen-free SATA cables either.
Who cares what they store it on? What's important is it adequately checked for consistency, and what are the backups like. Everything else is detail.
Guess what. Google bought off-the-shelf computer gear for years and some datacentres run things without "datacentre grade" cooling. They don't suffer because a) they do it properly (i.e. not RELY on those drives to never fail) and b) nobody notices because the service is still more than good enough.
"Enterprise"-grade drives are just warrantied for longer. It doesn't mean they won't die just as quickly. Like "RAID"-grade drives - same drive as every other one on the production lines.
It's like saying you can't use Intel Mobile chips in a datacenter. It might not be your first choice, but provided they fulfil all their service obligations (which includes response times, failover, etc.) then who notices and who cares?
Every single server I've ever installed used "consumer grade" drives. Every single desktop I've ever installed used "consumer grade" drives. Failures are actually FAR BELOW any stated MTBF and, who cares, because it takes seconds to replace and DOES NOT AFFECT THE OVERALL SERVICE for the user. And no-one I've worked for has ever lost data because of a drive failure. Ever. Even when servers have all but caught fire.
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The difference between an internet search engine and a cloud backup solution is that "good enough" for a search engine is that the results are satisfying enough that I keep returning to that particular search engine. "Good enough" for a backup solution means I can read my data back. Very different situations. Write-only storage isn't terribly useful.
Anyone who thinks enterprise grade drives and consumer grade drives are the same either hasn't ever seen an enterprise drive or they haven't actually compared.
Re:All on consumer grade drives..... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure who you are disagreeing with, but it's not me. My point was that there is a difference between consumer and enterprise grade drives. Not that enterprise grade is more reliable than consumer grade. The main differences I listed have to do with performance and the ability to get one's data off the drive.
Here are some basic facts about storage for you. A 5400 RPM drive has an average rotational latency of 5.5 milliseconds. A 7200 RPM drive averages 4 milliseconds. A 10K RPM drive, 3 milliseconds. And 15K RPM averages 2 milliseconds. This is just basic math -- any particular block on the drive will sometimes be right before the head and sometimes right behind the head. On average the platter has to spin halfway around to bring that block to the head.
But that's only a portion of the performance of a drive. The other part is how long it takes the head to move from track to track. This is much more design dependent. But in general enterprise drives are expected to have a seek time in the 3-5 millisecond range and consumer drives run 5 and up, typically 5-10 milliseconds.
Add these up and a typical 15K RPM drive will have about 6 ms latency and a typical 7200 RPM drive will have 11 ms latency. Which means that a 15K RPM drive can do approximately 165 random IO operations at it's typical latency (normally measured in terms of 4k, 8k or 16k IOs.) A 7200 RPM drive can do approximately 90 random IOPS. This is a big deal when dealing with multi-user server applications.
Additionally, all SAS and FC drives are dual ported and SAS and FC fabrics are multi-initiator. Which allows them to be deployed in fully redundant and fully active configurations (two paths between server and array, two controllers in the array, two mirrored caches and two paths from each controller to each disk.) A SATA drive has one port. There are port multiplexers that can be inserted between the drive and the chassis, but because the drive itself is natively single ported, only one of the multiplexed ports can be active at a time and thus are limited to having fail-over between the controllers rather than active-active controllers.
As far as RAID performance goes... Two mirrored 7200 RPM drives do not provide the equivalent of a 14.4K RPM drive. Minimum latency is limited by the speed of a single drive regardless of RAID of any type. Here's what a two drive RAID1 gets you: one redundant copy of your data. Twice as many read operations at the same latency as a single disk. And the write performance of a single disk. Because you can do twice as many read operations, you get double the read bandwidth. Yes you can add more drives to your mirror, but there comes a point where the rest of your storage subsystem becomes less redundant that your drives. RAID5 (or RAID6, or RAIDZ, or RAIDZ2, etc.) gets you redundancy to the level of however many disks worth of parity your system implements. For a standard RAID5 that is a single disk failure, for RAID6 it's two disks, etc. Read performance increases as a multiple of the number of drives in your raid group. Write performance is a read and a write of your data block plus a read and write for each parity block. For RAID5 that means that each write will do four IO operations into the raid group. So an eight drive raid group should get double the write performance of a single drive. Of course any array that one would use in an enterprise environment will have at least two battery backed up caches, which makes any write penalties moot as all writes are cached.
As far as reliability goes, that's an interesting question. The fact is hard drives die. However the premium I pay buying hard drives from my storage or server vendor includes 4 hour replacement SLAs in western countries and in less developed areas it's typically 24 hours. I don't know what Costco's policy is, but I'm sure it doesn't involve bringing the HDD to me today and I'd be surprised if I could show up three years later and have them replace my HDD with a matching device. Additionally consumer grade drive
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They actually have a guy whose job it is to just go around a day or two
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently you believe:
a) they store only one copy of your data
b) that "enterprise" hard drives are some how better quality
Here's a hint: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+hard+drive+report [lmgtfy.com]
Re: (Score:2)
It's safe to assume that your snarky lmgfty link goes with your point b? Have you actually read that report, in particular the first paragraph of section 2.2 where they state:
How exactly is a study of consumer-grade disk drives supposed to tell us anything about enterprise drives?
Re: (Score:2)
If your using hardware raid it gets important mostly the time limited error recovery bit to keep raid cards from failing out the drive while it's trying to recover a block, Backblaze is not use hardware raid so it's a non issue. They are a scale wide not deep strategy. When one persons restore can be spread around a dozen servers your limiting factor quickly becomes there internet speed.
Re:All on consumer grade drives..... (Score:4, Funny)