"Interview With the Podfather: Tim Nufire on the Origins of the Pod"
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/origins-of-the-pod/

"Tim led the effort to build what we at Backblaze call the Storage Pod:
The physical hardware our company has relied on for data storage for
more than a decade. On the occasion of the decade anniversary of the
open sourcing of our Storage Pod 1.0 design, we sat down with Tim to
relive the twists and turns that led from a crew of backup enthusiasts
in an apartment in Palo Alto to a company with four data centers spread
across the world holding 2100 storage pods and closing in on an exabyte
of storage."

Having 60 hard drives in a single enclosure just blows me away. Using
60 twelve TB drives is 720 TB. I don't even understand how the file
system works across 60 hard drives. I do know that they perform
mirroring and archival across those hard drives though.

Lynn

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On Thu, 26 Sep 2019 12:56:06 -0500, Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

Having 60 hard drives in a single enclosure just blows me away.

You can buy server cases that hold 15+ drives for ~$100, for example my
Norco 450B, so 60 drives just seems like an extension to that.

Using 60 twelve TB drives is 720 TB.

NTFS would yield about 670TB usable, but they don't use NTFS. Still, it's a lot. By comparison, I only have about 60TB (under 55TB usable).

I don't even understand how the file
system works across 60 hard drives. I do know that they perform
mirroring and archival across those hard drives though.

On my server, the OS drive (SSD) is standalone, but the other 15 spinning drives are merged into a single volume. There's really no mystery or magic
to it, IMHO.

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On 9/26/2019 3:33 PM, Mark Perkins wrote:

On Thu, 26 Sep 2019 12:56:06 -0500, Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

Having 60 hard drives in a single enclosure just blows me away.

You can buy server cases that hold 15+ drives for ~$100, for example my
Norco 450B, so 60 drives just seems like an extension to that.

Using 60 twelve TB drives is 720 TB.

NTFS would yield about 670TB usable, but they don't use NTFS. Still, it's a lot. By comparison, I only have about 60TB (under 55TB usable).

I don't even understand how the file
system works across 60 hard drives. I do know that they perform
mirroring and archival across those hard drives though.

On my server, the OS drive (SSD) is standalone, but the other 15 spinning drives are merged into a single volume. There's really no mystery or magic
to it, IMHO.

You might want to read the article. They talk about the vibration
caused by 45 hard drives is much greater than 15 hard drives. And the
power requirements are much greater.

And they use a custom written file system with mirroring and fault
detection for the spinning hard drives. The POD itself runs from an SSD
drive.

Lynn

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 18:09:04 -0500, Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com>
wrote:

On 9/26/2019 3:33 PM, Mark Perkins wrote:

On Thu, 26 Sep 2019 12:56:06 -0500, Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com>
wrote:

Having 60 hard drives in a single enclosure just blows me away.

You can buy server cases that hold 15+ drives for ~$100, for example my
Norco 450B, so 60 drives just seems like an extension to that.

Using 60 twelve TB drives is 720 TB.

NTFS would yield about 670TB usable, but they don't use NTFS. Still, it's a >> lot. By comparison, I only have about 60TB (under 55TB usable).

I don't even understand how the file
system works across 60 hard drives. I do know that they perform
mirroring and archival across those hard drives though.

On my server, the OS drive (SSD) is standalone, but the other 15 spinning
drives are merged into a single volume. There's really no mystery or magic >> to it, IMHO.

You might want to read the article. They talk about the vibration
caused by 45 hard drives is much greater than 15 hard drives. And the
power requirements are much greater.

And they use a custom written file system with mirroring and fault
detection for the spinning hard drives. The POD itself runs from an SSD >drive.

I had already read it, thanks. I've been following their trials and travels almost from their humble beginning. The custom filesystem is interesting,
but everything else about it is very straightforward.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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