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Comment by basilgohar | Hacker News Reader

What Backblaze is doing here is so underrated. This a large scale, practical, in-datacenter real data on essential hardware infrastructure that is available almost nowhere else, and they provide it, and their excellent analysis, completely for free.

I miss this culture and I admire leadership that allows it to not only exist, but thrive. I fear the day a stockholder meeting occurs and someone wringing their hands see the decommissioned pennies they can save by limiting or stopping these reports.

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What it buys is long-term good will. Engineers will see they know their stuff and suggest them as a solution for projects and people.

That said, all it would take is for the wrong leadership to start cutting corners to undo all of this hard work.

Backblaze stuck my email on a list, and now I get daily marketing spam from them. They shattered that good will with me very quickly.

This is the main reason I use them for their S3 compatible storage service over their competitors. While its not enterprise level revenue, I still like to think it makes a difference.

For as long as Backblaze has been doing this and at this level of quality, I have no doubt that these reports are good for business.

(As an anecdotal example -- I first heard about Backblaze from these reports many years ago and have relied on them to an extent in selecting new drives. I'm now a Backblaze customer.)

> I fear the day a stockholder meeting occurs and someone wringing their hands see the decommissioned pennies they can save by limiting or stopping these reports.

The Backblaze stock has taken a beating over the years. Recently I saw some news that there were issues with financial reporting (and fraud?). So it’s anybody’s guess as to what may happen or if the company would even be around (as it exists now) in the next decade.

I’d guess they may already have tools in place to prepare the stats and charts, leaving some amount of writing as manual work (which could or would probably be offloaded to generative AI). But analyzing the reliability of drives and publishing the data could also be seen as a competitive advantage when comparing with newer companies (positive and negative).

> by limiting or stopping these reports

Hopefully not, given the performance one was just newly added!

is there any danger this data is biased? Everything good gets corrupted eventually (amazon reviews, consumer reports, ..). is it possible they get some kickbacks for positive reviews ?

It's always possible. But I haven't seen anything that would imply this to be the case so far in all the years I've been reading this.

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