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by DanWaterworth 3880 days ago
It doesn't sound like the boot drive is a single point of failure since data is stored Reed-Solomon coded in chunks across many pods. If one data drive fails, the whole pod has to go down for maintenance for it to be replaced. The only difference is that you get to choose when to take a pod down for maintenance to replace a data drive.
1 comments
greglindahl 3880 days ago
That's the situation I was talking about, yes. It's much cheaper to go into the datacenter once a month to replace failed data disks than to have to go in to promptly replace any system disk HDD that fails, in order to not have 60 idle disks.
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DanWaterworth 3880 days ago
Sure, that would make sense if they only had personnel in the datacenter once a month, but: "we replace about 10 drives every day" [1].

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...

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DanWaterworth 3879 days ago
To clarify, I'm not saying that they wouldn't be better off with an SSD boot drive. I'm arguing that having an HDD boot drive, given their setup, isn't awful.
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