> You need to add "cost to repair" into your equation. At my old job we used to figure $300 to replace a drive
This is TOTALLY true, and Backblaze does add in the cost to repair. At our scale, we have full time datacenter technicians that are onsite 7 days a week for 12 hours a day (overlapping shifts) so that we can replace drives and repair equipment within a certain number of hours.
Every single day our monitoring systems kick out a list of about 10 drives that need to be replaced, and the data center techs try to make sure there are zero failed drives when their shift ends. (We leave failed drives alone for up to 12 hours at night as long as it is just one failed drive in a redundant group of 20.)
But if you are operating with FEWER than our 110,656 drives then you can't have full time repair people standing around paying their salary. So you are really going to need to pay much more (per drive) than we do.
One of the absolutely amazing things about "cloud services" like Amazon S3 or Backblaze B2 is that (hopefully) we can actually operate it at a lower cost and higher durability than you can operate yourself. That may not be true at either end of the spectrum - if you have fewer than 10 drives it may be cheaper for you to operate it yourself, and if you have more than 1,200 drives (the deployment size of one of our vaults) you might want to consider cutting out the middle-man (Backblaze) and saving yourself money. But I make the bold claim we can save you money in that sweet middle ground.
One of the factors to consider is the cost of electricity in your area. Backblaze pays about 9 cents/kWh which is "pretty good". Up in Oregon you can get deals for 2 cents/kWh and beat our operating costs, but in Hawaii you are at 50 cents/kWh and unless you have solar panels you pretty much better host data on the mainland. :-) I think TONS of people (mistakenly) think that after they purchase a hard drive, operating it is "free". Electricity is one of Backblaze's major costs in providing the service. Our electrical bill is more than $1 million per year right now.
Some people think we (Backblaze) get "magical good deals" by purchasing drives in bulk, and it isn't as good as you might think. Sure, we get some bulk discounts, but think 5% or 10% better than your retail price for 1 unit. And you can probably get THE SAME DEAL as Backblaze if you are purchasing 1,000 drives in one purchase order.
Backblaze is a pretty good deal. I'm currently trying to figure out if I should take my video files that I'm editing for my personal movies and store them on Backblaze (transmission time being the issue there) vs. getting a 10TB drive to put them on or a ZFS array, vs. just deleting the source. The latter has a very competitive price. :-D
> You need to add "cost to repair" into your equation. At my old job we used to figure $300 to replace a drive
This is TOTALLY true, and Backblaze does add in the cost to repair. At our scale, we have full time datacenter technicians that are onsite 7 days a week for 12 hours a day (overlapping shifts) so that we can replace drives and repair equipment within a certain number of hours.
Every single day our monitoring systems kick out a list of about 10 drives that need to be replaced, and the data center techs try to make sure there are zero failed drives when their shift ends. (We leave failed drives alone for up to 12 hours at night as long as it is just one failed drive in a redundant group of 20.)
But if you are operating with FEWER than our 110,656 drives then you can't have full time repair people standing around paying their salary. So you are really going to need to pay much more (per drive) than we do.
One of the absolutely amazing things about "cloud services" like Amazon S3 or Backblaze B2 is that (hopefully) we can actually operate it at a lower cost and higher durability than you can operate yourself. That may not be true at either end of the spectrum - if you have fewer than 10 drives it may be cheaper for you to operate it yourself, and if you have more than 1,200 drives (the deployment size of one of our vaults) you might want to consider cutting out the middle-man (Backblaze) and saving yourself money. But I make the bold claim we can save you money in that sweet middle ground.
One of the factors to consider is the cost of electricity in your area. Backblaze pays about 9 cents/kWh which is "pretty good". Up in Oregon you can get deals for 2 cents/kWh and beat our operating costs, but in Hawaii you are at 50 cents/kWh and unless you have solar panels you pretty much better host data on the mainland. :-) I think TONS of people (mistakenly) think that after they purchase a hard drive, operating it is "free". Electricity is one of Backblaze's major costs in providing the service. Our electrical bill is more than $1 million per year right now.
Some people think we (Backblaze) get "magical good deals" by purchasing drives in bulk, and it isn't as good as you might think. Sure, we get some bulk discounts, but think 5% or 10% better than your retail price for 1 unit. And you can probably get THE SAME DEAL as Backblaze if you are purchasing 1,000 drives in one purchase order.