Researchers have discovered that a pinch of table salt can get more data onto spinning hard drive platters. A lot more: 6 TB in a single platter!

Considering the latest drives have up to 5 platters, that would be 30 TB in a single hard drive. Put 45 of those drives into a Backblaze Storage Pod and you would store 1.35 petabytes (!) in a single storage pod; more than 10 petabytes in a single rack.

Hello, Big Data. Meet your best friend, Salt.

Cloud computing success relies on high-speed bandwidth. Whether streaming movies or running applications from the cloud, the ability to get data quickly from the cloud to the computer (or tablet or phone) is a key requirement for rapid adoption.

As such, we decided to take a look at how well Internet bandwidth to the home has kept up with another key ingredient of the cloud: hard drive prices. Below is the comparison and, unfortunately, it seems that while hard drive manufacturers have done a phenomenal job of capacity increases and price reduction (as an example, a petabyte should cost $94 trillion) – bandwidth to the home has not kept up. This means that people are continually able to do more locally than in the cloud.

There have been some interesting announcements in the space recently including Sonic.net testing 1 Gbps fiber for $70 and Comcast demoing 1 Gbps broadband over cable. Will bandwidth change it’s historical trajectory?

Possibly.

A customer yesterday asked, “Do you have any idea how big iCloud is?” I thought it was an interesting question and poked around.

Two months ago it was reported that Apple ordered 12 petabytes of storage rumored to be used for its new North Carolina data center.

Certainly Apple already has significant storage for their existing iTunes and MobileMe data and the North Carolina datacenter has room for much more than 12 petabytes, but is this the storage that Apple expected to need to support the iCloud offering initially? Apple would not confirm, of course, but it does seem plausible now with iCloud announced and Steve Jobs talking about Apple’s massive new datacenter:

Image source: Data Center Knowledge

At Backblaze we hit 10 petabytes of customer cloud storage by the end of 2010 and now we just crossed 15 petabytes!

It’s becoming challenging to take a good photo, but here is what 15 petabytes of Backblaze Storage Pods looks like:

So does Backblaze have more cloud storage than Apple for iCloud? Perhaps.

Twitter turned 5 years old yesterday. The service now has 200 million users (including @backblaze) who post over 1 billion tweets per day.

One interesting tidbit they recently mentioned was that all of those billions and billions of tweets compiled over the course of half a decade took a mere 20 terabytes of storage space!

In other words, you could archive all of the last 5 years of Twitter in just 1/3rd of an original Backblaze Storage Pod.

Happy Birthday Twitter! We wish you an amazing next five years!

These last couple days there has been much discussion in the media about whether the days of unlimited backup are over. Our answer is: No.

Backblaze is committed to unlimited backups.

There are 1 billion computers on this planet and less than 1% of them are backed up online. We provide an online backup service that is unlimited, unthrottled, and backs up all data automatically for one reason – it makes it a no-brainer to use online backup to protect data.

Some of our customers store a few gigabytes of data. Others store multiple terabytes. We make money on some customers and lose money on others. Our goal is not to specifically provide storage at a money-losing price to some customers, but it is to keep it simple for all customers.

To this end, we are focused on innovating on the cost efficiencies of cloud storage; an example of this is our purpose-built Backblaze Storage Pod. These innovations enable us to run Backblaze profitably, without raising venture funding; thus ensuring we will be able to continue providing our unlimited backup for the long-term.

Will Backblaze continue to provide unlimited backup?
Yes. We firmly believe this is the right approach and are committed to it.

Can Backblaze support this model?
Yes. We are profitably offering unlimited backup.

Won’t users store more data in the future?
Yes. Users have been creating more data since people started chiseling stone tablets. We are sure users will store more data in the future.

Will Backblaze be able to offer unlimited backup if users store more data?
Yes. Hard drive prices have been dropping about 4% per month per GB over the last 30 years. Thus, if users data grows at 50% per year, costs will stay relatively fixed for cloud storage companies. Moreover, cloud storage companies can benefit from innovating on the density of storage, compression, deduplication, power efficiency, and more. Users will store more data in the future – and unlimited backup will continue to be a sustainable model.

If you are looking to partner with a company to protect your digital photos, music, movies, and documents, give us a try free: www.Backblaze.com.

We love fast broadband speeds: faster upload speeds mean faster backups of your data to Backblaze. Often we salivate over claims of 10Mbps+ blistering connections.

However, periodically customers email us saying “I can’t seem to backup as fast as my Internet connection implies.” Looking at the the customer’s Internet connection, we see it’s slower than advertised – but it’s not clear why.

Today the FCC published a report (PDF) that this problem not affects a few unlucky customers, but is a widespread issue affecting most broadband Internet users. They say:

Therefore actual download speeds experienced by U.S. consumers lag advertised speeds by roughly 50% .

Apparently, US customers are not the only ones experiencing this. Broadband speeds in the UK were found to also be only about 50% of what was advertised.
Continue reading…

Wow. Seagate just announced the world’s first 3 TB drive. Called the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk, it’s big enough to hold about 1,000 full-length HD movies or 1 million digital photos or songs.

It is also twice the size of the Seagate drives we used in the Backblaze Storage Pod when we published the design in September. Switching to the 3 TB hard drives in our storage pods would mean one Backblaze Storage Pod would hold 135 TB of data: 45,000 full-length HD movies or 45 million digital photos or songs. That is one monster collection of media.

The Seagate 3 TB hard drives are only available for external use only at this point, so we can’t actually put them into our storage pods – but we’re keeping an eye out. If you want one one of these drives for yourself, they’re $250 at Seagate. (Note that you need to be using a 64-bit OS to take advantage of all the space.)

For my estimates, I’m assuming an HD movie is 3 GB (as Hot Tub Time Machine on iTunes is when I just looked at it a second ago) and a photo or song is 3 MB (as they are with a 5 megapixel camera and downloaded from iTunes respectively.)

CrunchGear published that the National Security Agency (NSA) is forecasting it may need yottabytes of storage to keep all of its surveillance data by 2015.

What is a yottabyte?
1000 GB = 1 Terabyte (TB)
1000 TB = 1 Petabyte (PB)
1000 PB = 1 Exabyte (EB)
1000 EB = 1 Zettabyte (ZB)
1000 ZB = 1 Yottabyte (YB)
In other words, a Yottabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB.

How much will this cost by 2015
On the one hand, what makes this even tougher is that typical storage systems cost 10x the price of the raw hard drives. Thus, the likely actual cost of storage for the NSA:
* $1,000 trillion for a complete storage system

The NSA may need to partner with NASA to see if it can spin off about 15 more planet Earth’s so their combined GDP could pay for its storage requirements.

On the other hand, this is based on prices and storage technology in 2009. But the cost per GB has dropped consistently 4% per month for the last 30 years. Assume the trend continues for the next 5 years, by when the NSA needs their yottabyte of storage. The costs in 2015 then would be:
* $8 trillion for the raw drives
*$80 trillion for a storage system

Well, that’s getting closer – a bit less than today’s global GDP.

How much space will this take by 2015?
Per historical metrics, a drive should hold 10 TB by 2015. The NSA would require:
* 100 billion hard drives
* 2 billion Backblaze storage pods

And of course, they would probably want this data backed up.
That might really test our offer of $5 for unlimited storage.

To be fair, the original analysis states that the need for yottabytes of information may not be accurate because it assumes that data is collected in a way similar to today. Instead, it purports they may only need hundreds of petabytes of data storage by 2015; significant, but completely manageable. Hard drives are also the assumed technology – which has been a good assumption for 30 years and may continue to be a good one for the next 5 years. SSD and other technologies may provide some interesting options, but in the near term, the price and density winner will likely continue to be spinning platters.

Regardless of how much data the NSA ends up needing to store, could we perhaps recommend a storage design?