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By the end of 2015, the Backblaze datacenter had 56,224 spinning hard drives containing customer data. These hard drives reside in 1,249 Backblaze Storage Pods. By comparison 2015 began with 39,690 drives running in 882 Storage Pods. We added 65 Petabytes of storage in 2015 give or take a Petabyte or two. Not only was 2015 a year of growth, it was also a year of drive upgrades and replacements. Let's start with the current state of the hard drives in our datacenter as of the end of 2015 and then dig into the rest later on. Hard Drive Statistics...

Storage. It's not a sexy topic. But everyone uses it in some way or another. You have iPhones, you have computers. Everyone knows how important a person's data is. But it doesn't just "disappear." Or does it? New research suggests that newer solid-state hard drives, which are faster and offer better performance, are vulnerable to an inherent flaw -- they lose data when they're left dormant in storage for periods of time where the temperature isn't properly regulated. The worrying factor is that the period of time can be weeks, months, but even in some circumstances -- just a few...

Thai Floods Jolt PC Supply Chain By SHARA TIBKEN Western Digital Corp. said flooding in Thailand is having a "significant impact" on the hard-disk drive maker's operations and its ability to meet customer demand in the current quarter, adding supply concerns to an industry already hurt by weak consumer spending on PCs. The flooding in Thailand, the world's second-largest exporter of hard-disk drives, comes during the key selling season for hard-disk drives, with PC makers obtaining supplies for holiday sales. Analysts said it likely will lead to higher prices and potential supply constraints later this year or early next year....

Hard drives could experience a massive increase in capacity next year now that a "major" HDD maker has placed an order for equipment to mass-produce 'patterned media' drives. Earlier this week, Malmö, Sweden-based fabrication-equipment maker Obducat announced it had reached an agreement with "a major player in th HDD industry" to supply the unnamed company with up to SKR66m ($11.13m) worth of lithography hardware. Obducat will provide the mystery vendor with a "production-ready" Sindre lithography machine, used to create the high data-density surfaces used by the new drive technology. More equipment orders may follow, the Swedish firm said. Fujitsu is...

Seagate Technology this week introduced a hard drive that it claims is the fastest hard drive available in a 2.5 inch form factor. Meanwhile ProStor Systems Inc. announced a new high-capacity removable disk drive as a replacement for tape media for workstations and servers in small and midsize markets. The Seagate Savvio 15K drive is a 15,000rpm serial attached SCSI drive (SAS). It is designed for use in both rack-mounted servers and blade servers. The Savvio drive is 70% smaller than other 15K drives on the market and has 30% less power consumption, the company said. The drive has a...

Toshiba Reaches 200GB Milestone Stroage, storage, storage. That's what a media center laptop needs and Toshiba's new 2.5 inch hard drive gives you just that. The 200GB dual-platter MK2035GSS is Toshiba's first Perpendicular Magnetic Recording drive to incorporate tunnel magneto-resistive recording (TMR) head technology (no, we don't know what that last bit means either, but it sounds impressive). PMR technology enables bits of data to be stored in a perpendicular format rather than longitudinally and, thus enables the magnetic disc to store significantly more data in the same space.The new drive sets a density record, says Toshiba, although the outright...