[dfrage]

> Backblaze's system architecture is fairly failure tolerant, so they use a huge number of "consumer" grade drives that would cause enterprise people to run away screaming.

I think what would "cause enterprise people to run away screaming" is that your data is stored by them in only one data center, and they don't offer a S3 compatible API (although someone may have addressed the latter).

Backblaze however correctly notes that if you really want redundancy, you get that from using two or more vendors.

Tape is physically a lot more robust than hard drives, the single endurance advantage the latter have is better tolerance of environmental extremes, heat and humidity.