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Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

I might be missing something, but the whole point of zpools is to guard against disks failure; this service only gives you one drive at a time, so you are back to square one. Is it not better to provide multiple smaller disks, so that the sum goes to 8TB ?

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My thinking is the aim of this is a cheap way to store large volumes of data (eg from a ZFS NAS). Multiple disks would offer redundancy but would be more expensive. Since this is a backup service, the outcome of having that drive fail is less severe (ie you can put a new disk in and repopulate the backup) than if that was your primary storage device. For home users this might be an acceptable risk given there isn't much else out there in the same cost point ($/TB) and which also support ZFS.

Businesses and enterprise users would likely prefer an organisation with a proven track record (eg rsync.net) anyway -- even data replication aside.

I guess the idea is that you rent multiple disks at once. Two disks of 8 TB each let you mirror the data redundantly for example.

It seems to me if you want multiple drives you're gonna have multiple accounts.

But this seems to be a beta phase so I guess it's more important to iron out the issues around creating a business that works, then you can have more drives in your account.

It says the following on the page:

>Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.

Usually yes, but i wouldn't mind a single 8TB drive just as a backup location. All my data is already on a nice redundant system at home, but having just 1 extra replica somewhere else would be really good.

As far as I understand, you can rent multiple 8TB drives

Personally I'd use this as a backup target that I could stream ZFS snapshots to.

Zpools with the correct level of redundancy protects against bit rot, occasional hardrive failure and the like(as you correctly point out), but not against total machine loss.

Its probably helpful to think of it as an offsite backup more than anything else.

It says on the page

> Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.

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