SMR drives are sometimes less expensive but are demonstrably slower with random writes and when they are reusing space made available from previous file deletes. We do not use Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives.
Drive TypeĪll of the drives we purchase use Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), also known as Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). Speaking of expectations, look for those drives to show up in the quarterly Drive Stats reports starting about mid-2023. Of course, we will wait a bit before purchasing in bulk to ensure the qualified drive models are stable over time and the price per gigabyte meets our expectations. In 2023 we expect to qualify 18TB, 20TB, and potentially 22TB drives. In addition, the 16TB count does not include 12,000 drives purchased and scheduled for delivery over the next few months. It is possible we could purchase a small group of spares for one of the other drive sizes. The 16TB drives are the only drive size we are currently purchasing. The breakdown in drives purchased by drive size is shown below.
Thank you, Cecilia! The 265,322 number is not precise-some drives were purchased before 2009, some drives were purchased and never put into service, and, occasionally, we received a small number of test drives from manufacturers. We even recorded each of the hundreds of hard drives purchased during our drive farming days in 2011 and our crowdsourcing days in 2012. In that time, we’ve purchased 265,332 hard drives. How Many Drives?īackblaze has purchase records going back to 2009. In the meantime, let’s look at our hard drive purchases over the years and see what we can learn about the cost per gigabyte of hard drive storage. That’s not quite a penny, but we think we’ll get there soon enough. Today, we can get 16TB hard drives for about $0.014 per gigabyte on average. In 2017, when we did a review of the cost of hard drives, the cost per gigabyte had fallen to just below $0.03 per gigabyte. When Backblaze purchased hard drives back in 2009, we paid over $0.11 per gigabyte. Instead, how about “a penny for a gigabyte of hard disk”? That’s new, tech-y, and, well, it’s almost true. “A penny for your thoughts” is a common boomer expression (so says my 23 year old).
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