Backblaze Has 150PBs of Customer Data Stored

On the blog of Backblaze, Inc, was plublished the following anouncement.

Backblaze now has 150PB of customer data safely stored by our cloud backup service and waiting to be restored by our customers when requested.

This customer data is stored encrypted on 980 Backblaze Storage Pods which contain 44,100 data HDDs of sizes ranging from 2 to 6TB.

Each week, new Storage Pods come online with either 4 or 6TB drives installed depending on their configuration. Continuously adding Storage Pods allows us to stay several months ahead of the demand in case we have another Thailand drive crisis or similar surprise.

Trying to comprehend 150PB of anything can be daunting. In simple mathematical terms it is 150,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 150 followed by 15 zeroes.

OK, maybe that doesn’t help very much, so let’s just start at the beginning …

Bit: a binary decision of either 0 or 1.

Byte: 8 bits

Kilobyte: 1,000 bytes

• Expressed as KB or K
• Example: I have a 360 K floppy disk.

Megabyte: 1,000KB

• 1,000,000 bytes
• 1 million bytes
• Expressed as MB or M
• Example: The photo on my computer is 3 MB.

Gigabyte: 1,000MB

• 1,000,000,000 bytes
• 1 billion bytes (short scale)
• 1 milliard or a thousand million bytes (long scale)
• Expressed as GB or G
• Example: I have 8GB of random access memory in my laptop.

Terabyte: 1,000GB

• 1,000,000,000,000 byte
• 1 trillion bytes (short scale)
• 1 billion bytes (long scale)
• Expressed as TB or T
• Example: I purchased a 3 TB external HDD for my computer.

Petabyte: 1,000TB

• 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
• 1 quadrillion bytes (short scale)
• 1 billiard or a thousand billion bytes (long scale)
• Expressed as PB or P
• Example: Backblaze has 150PB of customer storage.