[anarcticpuffin]

I agree that what the article misses is that Backblaze is spending the money on software rather than hardware, since the price difference is so huge (and the software solution is a fixed cost).

What I'm more interested in is whether the lower MTBF of the cheap drives and home-brewed chassis ends up with a higher cost per year due to higher failure rates. If a desktop drive costs $100 and fails three times a year, but a server drive costs $200 and fails once every 2, the initial cost savings is moot.

[sho]

Well, remember that if you were seriously on a budget you'd just return all the failed drives for warranty replacement (Seagate is 5yrs). The hardware costs would never add up to more than the enterprise, it's that the labour costs of dealing with it would be more, and worse - more likely to lose data. Enough more likely to justify the additional cost? Hm, I doubt it, not for this use case.