Build Your Own Backblaze Storage Pod

To keep the cost of their off site mac and pc backups incredibly low 5.

Build your own backblaze storage pod.

For the individual storage pods we cluster 15 hard drives into a single raid6 volume with two parity drives out of the 15. As a highly open company backblaze publishes detailed information on the storage pod hardware the vault software and the reliability statistics behind the hard drives it uses. Backblaze says it can build a 180tb storage pod 6 0 for 8 733 73 with a cost per gigabyte of 0 036. We ve used 4tb drives in this post for consistency but we have in fact built storage pods with 5 6 and even 8 tb drives.

That said if you do build your own we d like to hear from you. Below is a layer cake diagram. The pods boot 64 bit debian 4 linux and the jfs file system and they are self contained appliances where all access to and from the pods is through https. Building a 480tb storage pod for less than a 0 05 per gb.

Part i why you should never build a backblaze pod this post part ii why we built a backblaze pod part iii our real world backblaze pod costs part iv backblaze pod assembly integration pictures part v backblaze initial performance data part vi backblaze pod software configuration future post. Backblaze invented the storage pod for their cloud storage requirements off site backups for mac users like you and me. A backblaze storage pod runs free software. As a reminder backblaze does not sell storage pods and the design is open source so we don t provide support or warranty for people who choose to build their own storage pod.

Instead backblaze suggests that you buy an empty. Bioteam s backblaze 2 0 project 135 terabytes for 12 000. The price you would pay to purchase a backblaze inspired storage pod or a storinator from 45 drives. In our previous storage pod blog posts we published the backblaze prices but people soon learned that they had to pay more for many of the parts sometimes a lot more.

If you want to build your own storage pod backblaze does provide a complete parts list and blueprint but it would be a pretty epic endeavor. It reckons you could buy the parts and assemble one yourself pdf for 10 398 57 or buy one. Last year it showed us the first backblaze storage pod 67tb for a build price of 7 867 and now it has developed the storage pod 2 0 which uses hitachi s new 3tb drives to create a. The price backblaze contractually pays to build about 25 storage pods a month.

For backblaze vault storage pods each is one of 20 pods needed to create a backblaze vault. The raid array is created with the mdadm utility.