[baruch]

Their use case is mostly write-once, they fill the data and never delete. The write-rate is probably more limited by the upload speeds of its users than the disk bandwidth and the multitude of port-multipliers that they use. Recovery is anyway mostly about copying all the user data to an external HDD and ship that which is a lot less performance critical as shipping the HDD will take a lot longer than reading all the data from across their systems.

As for saving power by spinning down disks, it is likely to be useful to them and is completely possible even in SW RAID though it requires some managing to perform effectively.

There isn't much that is applicable directly to most other use-cases but if your data is mostly sitting idle and you only need occasional access to it the backblaze pod is a nice design. If you care about performance and do not deploy multiple pods with redundancy between them you are not likely to be happy with the result.

[morganw]

> Recovery is anyway mostly about copying all the user data to an external HDD and ship that which is a lot less performance critical as shipping the HDD will take a lot longer than reading all the data from across their systems.

I've restored just a few files from Backblaze. While it's an "offline" operation where you choose the file, then get a notification when it's ready to be downloaded, it took only a handful of minutes.

It's not why I signed up with them, but it was delightful that it worked.