[jmcguckin]

I think Backblazes pricing model is unsustainable and expect them (and any competitors who mimic their model) to eventually fail when the money runs out. Racks and racks of disk drives use a lot of power and cost a lot to keep running. A better model would be storage based on tape; one of those large tape libraries (e.g. iceberg) with nearline disk space. Most of the data that gets uploaded never gets accessed, so keeping it on tape instead of spinning rust makes sense. Sure, there’s tradeoffs, but imagine how much they’d save if they could downsize their data center spending by 90%.