Over the years, we have listened to feedback from hundreds of very bright people involved in a wide variety of applications. Because we are part of Protocase, a mass customizer and the fastest low-volume metal manufacturer on earth, evolving the design was an inevitable step for us and continues to be an ongoing endeavour. And we really can't help thinking about variations to the design, and how it might improve the pod for various applications. But we experienced a number of challenges when we sold these to the larger storage community.Īt 45 Drives, it is in our nature to get to know our customers and what they are doing (or want to do) with their pod. But all things considered, limited throughput speed was a reasonable sacrifice for Backblaze, and backplanes were what drove the success of Pods 1.0 to 3.0.īackblaze has operated their business successfully for years now, mostly with backplane machines. Also, data for 5 drives shares 1 SATA cable (3Gbit in the original design), limiting performance to 60 MBytes per second per drive (whereas mechanical drives can transfer approximately 150 MBytes per second). Physical dimensions of 5 port boards follow a defacto standard.
#Backblaze storage pod drivers
The SATA adaptors must be chipset compatible with the backplane port multipliers, and drivers are required. There are a few restrictions and caveats, of course. Combined with Backblaze's vertical mounting, this was a brilliant design. Therefore, 45 drives require only 9 cables and SATA ports. This allows up to 5 hard drives to be plugged into the board, and multiplexed and sent through 1 cable to a shared SATA port. These are circuit boards that have multiple SATA hard drive connectors (5, in this case), and one SATA cable connector.
If you're looking for more information on the DIY storage pods, as well as parts lists and blueprints, check out the blog post here.The original Backblaze Storage Pods were designed around port multiplier backplanes. Granted, you're not getting the name recognition and comfort found with something like Amazon AWS, but that doesn't mean that Backblaze delivers a suboptimal service, they simply aren't as large as Amazon or Microsoft. Backblaze 3.82K subscribers Subscribe 206 45K views 8 years ago Weve redesigned our Storage Pod with some great improvements. For those worried about the prices, B2 is cheaper than other services, also coming in at about 1/4th the cost. If building your own storage pods and server isn't your cuppa tea, then Backblaze also offers cloud storage through their own cloud storage solution, B2. The internals of a storage pod from Backblaze Based on the use of a 4U chassis, Backblaze includes blueprints, wiring diagrams, STEP files, build instructions, and even a parts list to make assembly that much easier. Backblaze doesn't sell these pods directly, however, but in the true nature of the digital age, they have open sourced the hardware design. While major institutions and businesses might not be as worried about costs, startups, private education, and hobbyist looking for large storage solutions will welcome the lower price. This obviously still isn't cheap when you look at the big picture, but in comparison to something like Amazon or Microsoft's cloud platforms, the price actually is around 1/4th the cost. With the new 6.0 storage pod, users can get up 480TB of storage space for as little as $0.036 per gigabyte.
If you're a business, educational institution, or even a weekend hobbyist looking to build your own server for storage, Backblaze's DIY Storage Pod might just be the answer.
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