Jason Shellen › Comments

I just checked Snopes and didn't see anything - are you sure? - Daniel J. Pritchett

Totally 100% Daniel. I even tipped techmeme and then regretted it - Jorge Escobar

:) - ffcode

Unshared. Smartypants. ;) - Jason Shellen

Thank you sir. Just trying to keep your geek cred intact. (Or ruin it) :) - Louis Gray

Unclear if the seller is a sleazy-broker-in-disguise, but it's priced low and in your old 'hood. Go look! - Richard Chen

As long as you can afford the upkeep and insurance, have at it. - Alex Scoble

Classic car insurance would be cheap, guessing <$300/yr from hagerty.com. As for potential rust and hidden skeletons... Hey, did we already talk about low insurance costs? - Richard Chen

Good year... I'm a '73 model myself. - Jason Shellen

One reason not to buy it is to buy a 964 instead. - Cristo

Ad is gone now -- that was fast. Quite probably a genuine steal. - Richard Chen

Hey Jason, thanks for the response; I'll have to look again. I thought I saw a couple of flickr images that didn't inline earlier (which obviously prompted my remark.) Does it handle regular flickr.com URLs as well as flickr's own shortened links? I'll update if I see it again, maybe with a screenshot or something. - alex falkenberg

You were correct. We pushed a fix last night. - Jason Shellen from iPhone

No offense to you Rigza, however we American's are used to seeing announcement to never send anything to Libya, Iraq and North Korea. - Jason Shellen

Oh, I assumed you felt dirty for using paypal. - Jim Norris

Nope, just makin' a joke. - Jason Shellen

such a smart ass there sjellen - charlie larson

LOL - charlie larson

So why not sue them for prior art? I don't see what's evil about protecting your inventions. - Jesse Stay

OMG. - Paola Bonomo

BING! - Jimminy

Amazing how, throughout history, the inventor and the patent holder are often different folks. - Kurt Starnes

No, they are evil for stealing an idea and SAYING they invented it. A patent is a legal representation that you CREATED something unique. Google KNOW they didn't create reading lists, so patenting it is a form of fraud. Whether they sue or not is irrelevant. - Sean Kaye

What if they truly think they invented it? That's what the legal system is for. I'm not saying Dave's not right, nor am I saying Google's right. I'm just saying this type of thing is exactly what patents are for. - Jesse Stay

WTF? not sure how that's going to be enforceable! maybe it was just an evil phase they were going through. - Chris Myles

I saw a bunch of different things mentioned (fine-grained privacy options related to tags, imaginary users represented as criteria/rules/filters)--to claim that it's "reading lists" is a gross overgeneralization. Dave, are you genuinely saying that Google is evil because of one patent application? What would you propose--that Google never file for any patents? - Matt Cutts

I'm going to agree with Matt here Dave. This is not a patent on reading lists. I'm up for a longer discussion tomorrow. - Jason Shellen

^-- Jason Shellen is listed as one of the inventors on the patent, so I'll gently back out now and leave it to Jason to decide if he wants to discuss it in more detail. :) - Matt Cutts

Put me down for two. - Jason Shellen

45 drives per unit and many units means they must be constantly replacing failed hard drives - just due to the sheer quantity of them in use - Jacob Old

It wasn't entirely clear to me from the blog post what you have to do to replace a drive. Looks like at minimum you have to remove the unit from the rack, and I don't see any drawer guides or similar to assist with that. And do they have to take the unit offline to replace a single drive? - Jason Wehmhoener

Geez. Back in 1998, Microsoft was bragging about their 1 TB cloud... :-) Millions of $ then I think. - Mitchell Tsai

One happy Backblaze customer checking in. - Russellreno

sounds neat - now what to do with 67 TB of storage... - Matt Ellsworth

Seriously Matt! Lots and Lots and Lots of video? HD video! - Rick Cogley

So, they store their data "securely" in Palo Alto? That makes me scared. - Jonas S Karlsson

Quoted from blog- "Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesn’t allow for a single point of failure." They have indicated an amazing amount of cost savings. - Wins Fern

$117k for a petabyte of storage. Wow. - Nicholas James

Petabyte schmetabyte. - Rick Cogley

Mitchell: I don't think 1TB was "millions of dollars" in 1998. - Steve de Mena

Nice idea. Pity that it only supports a HTTPS interface, not surprising at that cost though (the software that runs the filesystems on the NetApp and other devices isn't exactly cheap to write). Anyone see if they quoted transfer speeds? I'm wondering what impact the four SATA cards each with SATA multipliers on them has when it comes to access speeds. - Russ

Steve: according to http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625... disk cost ~$0.08 / mb in 1998, which comes out to >$800,000 for 1 TB or just over a million bucks in todays dollars. so maybe not millions, but a million! - Karl Rosaen

Russ: It runs Debian. If you were rolling your own (and they don't sell these units), you could turn on NFS or some other protocol (CIFS, iSCSI). They only use HTTP because it's cloud storage. NFS license is a major expense on NetApp, but all the major Linux distributions can act as NFS servers, CIFS servers, and probably iSCSI targets. - Andy Dustman

Andy: I know that you could do that on them but it leaves the problem of what to do with the storage. You could merge the 3 volumes into an LVM VG but the performance could become an issue with any load on it. It seems I wasn't the only one to question the performance, while the views of a Sun engineer aren't exactly unbiased it does highlight some of the downsides: http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archive... - Russ

Russ, great find, thanks. - Jason Wehmhoener

Fascinating article; but more questions: "In rough terms, every time one of our customers buys a hard drive, Backblaze needs another hard drive." -- so what happens when a drive fails; how much redundancy is there? What happens when a meteorite destroys the whole building; is there off site backup too? (I know this *is* the off-site backup, but still...) I wonder how much data flows in and out over time. Maybe I should just read their website. - Rob Fisher

Rob: they mention using 15 drive RAID6 volumes that can lose up to 2 drives before failure - Mike Chelen

The worst part about this cluster design is the fact that I couldn’t shut up about it for the first couple days after finding out about it. It was the solution I proposed to every problem. There were complaints. - A Mitchell

IMO RAID6 is not that great. Granted, it's highly unlikely to lose 3 drives at the same time, but there's still possibility. Besides, for write-intensive app, parity calculation is quite time-consuming. I personally prefer RAID 10 (striped array of RAID1 pairs). Yes the effective usable space is less than half total capacity, but for backups -- which will sooner or later be used to restore something -- I prefer data integrity over usage efficiency. - Pandu ● IT Optimizer from fftogo

Bret - You'll have to swing by when you are in town. - Jason Shellen

how cool is that!! dont try to approach them because those deer can kick some butt with their hooves if they feel threatened. they sure are cool to wacth from afar though. - charlie larson

Oh Deer ! - Alan Morris

o my deer...............so cool and so fun - Elinoar