Backblaze happens to use software RAID6 - standard Debian Linux, we use the built in mdadm tool. Our current pods have 8 GBytes of RAM, so I guess they could theoretically use all of that (and swap) instead of using "crummy RAID controllers with no memory to speak of".

It all matters what you value - reliability or performance. EITHER ONE is valid for companies, you can't say every "Enterprise" wants drives that error faster and successfully get the data back less often. Backblaze is a company, we value reliability way way WAAAAAAAY over performance. We want the hard drive to take 90 seconds and give us the data - heck, take a full 3 days to get the data back, we'll wait, so will our customers. We have no performance problems at all - customers are extremely happy getting a successful restore FedEx'ed to them in 48 hours (one of the restore options is a $189 3 TByte hard drive sent to you anywhere in the world where you keep the hard drive).

What qualifies as "major"? :-) This article is about Backblaze, we have 25,000 consumer hard drives, are we "major"?

I totally agree that "bureaucracy affects IT decisions". In a previous company we sold spam blocking software (we were the good guys) but our customers asked us to provide the software and hardware in a bundle because they had a hard time convincing their management to purchase stand alone computer hardware. So we pre-bought a PC clone, marked it up by a FACTOR OF 4 (for our trouble), put a sticker on the front with our company name and the IT guys happily passed the price on to their managers who happily signed the P.O.

The cache is whatever is written on the drive, so a "Enterprise" drive with 32 MB of cache has less than a "Consumer" drive with 64 MB. I don't know what the heck you think the word "Enterprise" gets you in this case?

Different storage arrays have different requirements, I hate the idea that people think "Enterprise" magically got all the tradeoffs correct. For example, low power and high responsiveness are BOTH valid goals but probably are at odds. Some Enterprises (like Backblaze and Shutterfly) care deeply about their electrical power bill and the drives aren't the performance bottleneck. Should we buy enterprise drives or not?

It is a common misconception (pushed by the drive manufacturers) that RAID arrays need Enterprise drives. RAID stands for "Redundant Array of ***INEXPENSIVE** Drives". The whole idea is you write a software layer that deals with the failures and limitations of the cheap drives. If your RAID software cannot handle independent drive failures, precisely what value is that layer adding? We have not seen "Enterprise" drives work better in a high vibration environment. It's an old joke but worth repeating: You know how you can tell if a hard drive salesperson/company representative is lying to you? Watch their lips closely, if their lips are moving, they are lying.

Our Dell shelves (billing servers and store customer account info) have hot spares already spinning inside the shelves. NetApp Filers do this also. If a drive fails, the storage system begins IMMEDIATELY transitioning to the spare. So I agree with you wholeheartedly there. Backblaze uses RAID6 for the customer backup storage where we group 15 drives into a RAID group with 2 parity drives. So we can lose any 2 drives out of 15 and the data is still 100% intact. I really, REALLY cannot recommend RAID5 to anybody. Having a lone hard drive is fine for some applications (my laptop), and having RAID6 with 2 parity drives is fine for some applications. I cannot imagine why you would have RAID because you care about your uptime, but not care enough to use more than RAID5.

At our company the "billing servers" have to be high performance do not have to be very large (a few terabytes) , and we keep trying to justify SSDs but always end up back with Dell drive shelves with 15k rpm old fashion drives for less money. Each time we do the analysis I hope to move over to SSDs, and ONE OF THESE YEARS it will be cheaper to go with SSDs. Just not yet. :-(

Are you saying that the enterprise drives last longer? Or just that they are replaced for free when they die at the same or higher rates? If you want to save money, I think the answer is *NOT* buy the warranty (so buy consumer drives) because the warranty costs more than just replacing the failed drives?

If drives fail at 2 percent per year, your warranty should probably not cost you more than 2 percent additional money, right? Otherwise you might as well just stock spare drives and skip the part about including HP. How much does your enterprise drive warranty cost?

Disclaimer: Backblaze engineer here. I don't think all "commercial storage systems" get exactly the same "hammering". Some commercial systems are used to store data quietly for a long time (let's say online backup or shutterfly storage of photos), some commercial systems are hammered constantly (google's homepage search). I reject the concept that "enterprise" or "commercial" is a thing. You MUST look at the specific application. Some consumers use their hard drives quite a bit, some don't. Some corporations are hammering away at their drives, some are not.

Here is a funny outtake video. The "lighter fluid" container Cara (the woman) is holding actually contains water. There is a small plate hidden on the laptop keyboard with a thimbleful of unleaded gasoline waiting to be lit. This was an outtake where the plate got warm and the result was too tall of a flame: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g4JRtX9Wljc

Toss a match into a plate holding a thimbleful of gas - the stuff LIGHTS UP sooooooo easily. We used it as a cheap special effect for a promotional video. After a few "takes", the plate got warmer and evaporated a little more gas faster, the flames would leap about 3 feet vertically from the plate with the gas.

Caring / avoiding harm, and equity/justice are universal morals (care about others, don't hurt them, and be just and equitable to others).

Humans and primates have these values ingrained in them. When people violate them, they feel guilty (sociopaths are pathological because they violate them without guilt).

Other universal morals, like group loyalty, are usually subordinate to these main two. That is, you should not harm lots of outsiders unfairly out of blind loyalty to your own group.

"Do unto others" is much too simple, but I think it's intended to suggest care/avoid harm and equity/justice.