Keep in mind that Backblaze’s current purchase rate of about 200 PB/year is 0.04% of the global HDD market (469 EB in 2016). The HDD portion of the R&D budget of each of the 3 companies that make HDDs is many times greater than Backblaze’s total revenue. Western Digital has 80K employees, making it bigger than Nvidia, AMD, GlobalFoundries, Asus, and Facebook…combined.

If you take the power draw of the drives (provided in the table in the article) and multiply by 60, you get something in the 300-550 watt range, whereas the CPU, ram, etc. should be less than 300W combined for the components used in the storage pod v6. So I’d estimate between 50% and 90% of the power used by a storage pod is used to power drives.

It turns out to be the other way around, actually (I’m an engineer at Seagate, and I am not speaking on behalf of my employer). Most of the energy dissipated by a mechanical HDD is due to air resistance and spindle motor power electronics inefficiency. The “idle” power usage stats provided in the article are for drives with platters spinning, but no I/O going on. The huge difference between the power usage of helium drives vs. air-filled drives makes this evident: The ST8000*s in the table (6 platters in air, >7W idle) vs. the ST10000NM0086 (7 platters in helium, <5W idle). So more than 80% of the energy is used for spinning disks, and less than 20% running solid state electronics (within the drive itself, not including the host computer's electronics).

Oops, sorry, I should have been more clear by “solid state stuff” I meant the CPU, RAM, chipset, VRs and all the non-drive parts (didn’t mean to imply SSD). On my builds, the single NVMe SSD probably never uses more than 6-7 W, so maybe 2-3% of total system load when everything is breathing hard. I would imagine with your small CPU/RAM combo and Tons ‘o Drives configuration would reverse the equation.

I’m not sure on the exact ratios or wattages, but the hard drives themselves are definitely the clear majority of the power draw. They’re small individually, but multiplied by 45 or 60 it adds up. The CPU mostly just shuffles bits around plus some carefully-optimized Reed-Solomon and (AES-NI assisted) SSL, so it doesn’t need to be extremely powerful.

SSDs would make a huge difference in power, but they’re still something like 5x the price. We’re eagerly awaiting the day (well, year) when they get close enough to spinning-platter prices to be worth it :)

I don’t think our PSUs are Platinum, but they don’t really need to be: our power draw is relatively steady, so the PSUs can be sized precisely enough to stay around the narrower “optimal” range for gold/silver/bronze.