Hacker News Reader

I must have missed it somehow, but what is the difference between boot drives and data drives in a typical Backblaze server other than the boot drives store the OS? Obviously you don’t need 8TB capacity solely for the OS, I’d assume you also store user data on boot drives? In which case why is there a distinction?

View on HN

Yev here from Backblaze -> Mainly it's the OS and log files - the reason we make a distinction is that the boot drives typically do not have as much load as the data drives, so it wouldn't be a real 1:1 comparison.

Thanks! What’s the capacity and utilization rate of those boot drives, then?

Andy from Backblaze here: The capacity of the boot drives ranges from 80 to 500gb typically. They are mostly hard drives with some SSDs added recently. We are switching over to SSDs for boot drives. The workload is reasonable, but on the higher side as they not only boot the systems, they also are used to store log files temporarily - so lots of reads, writes, and deletes. Since we only have a little over 2,000, any data we published not be very accurate. If you are really interested, the boot drive data is in the data files we publish each quarter.

Thanks for the pointer! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com