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Comment by cthulhujr | Hacker News Reader

Are they offering the 6.0 controllers, etc. with the standard length housing? I would think that's an option soon, if not now. Perhaps the 6.0 controllers have no benefit with fewer drives.

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Brian from Backblaze here. Just to be absolutely clear, you cannot "buy" one of these from Backblaze. We don't sell them. You are free to take these instructions and assemble one yourself though! And so yes, you could simply drop the 6.0 controllers into an older chassis and it will work fine.

Also, the 6.0 housing will fit in most racks. If somebody can either measure their racks or include a link where the 33" chassis will no longer fit, we really want to hear about it!

Protocase, the vendor Backblaze sourced to fabricate the enclosures, has their own subsidiary that'll sell you turnkey pods:

http://www.45drives.com/

Surely they should be rebranding to 60drives now? ;)

Per the article, the electronics are unchanged, just 3 more backplanes and one SATA card: "When looking at what’s new in Storage Pod 6.0 it would easy to say it has 60 drives and stop there. After all, the Motherboard, CPU, memory, SATA cards, and backplanes we use didn’t change from 5.0."

Later in the bullet list of changes:

"Added 3 more backplanes and 1 more SATA card."

Presumably the first statement refers to make and model, rather than quantity, in which an increase is implied by the increase in number of drives.

Yev from Backblaze here -> You can buy these pods (well, not 6.0 at the moment, but previous versions) from BackupPods -> http://www.backuppods.com/

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