I've spent 12 years in the 'backup business', and I agree. > I do think for the average consumer or the more neglectful business, that we will see far more issues related to data corruption and loss during the transition from hard disks to SSDs. But for now, we retire old equipment for cost reasons before it fails, so all the drives have enough longevity for us. Now, if hard drives stop increasing in density, or take 8 years to increase by a factor of three, then we will need to re-evaluate based on failure rates and the like. Basically any drive takes the same amount of electricity (and physical rental space) as any other drive, so when we can 'shrink' the footprint to 1/3 the former footprint, we save 2/3 on space rental and 2/3 on the electricity so it is worth doing. The rough rule of thumb is that it is worth us moving to more dense drives when we can get than factor of three density increase.

Right now as we speak we are planning on moving data off of 4 TByte drives to 12 TByte drives.

I definitely don't think these issues will affect Backblazeįor pure cost reasons, we (Backblaze) tend to migrate off of the smaller drives after about 5 years anyway.

Backblaze raises personal backup