Top all-time · #1152
StorageMojo
Personal blog · storagemojo.comdatahardware
StorageMojo is a personal blog at storagemojo.com about data and hardware. Since 2007, 58 different Hacker News readers have linked it 63 times, most often “Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL (2014)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 31 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Robin Harris's storage blog, linked for analysis of storage hardware, costs and reliability, including speculation on how Amazon Glacier stores data and Google's disk failure research.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 31 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL (2014)12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2015-06-22
- Google Study On Failure Rates of Cheap Hard Drives6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2008-11-22
- Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-04-25
- Why did Apple drop ZFS?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-08-31
- Bandwidth reduction for erasure coded storage2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-07-13
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-04-17
What Hacker News says?
I think this is a good guess, http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdx...
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “I ended up paying $150 for a single 60GB download from Amazon Glacier”Submitted Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL? as a story · 276 points
HN discussionIt's often assumed that Amazon uses tape for glacier but that's actually unfounded. Amazon's keeping the details of glacier as a trade secret[1] [1]: http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdx...
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “SSD Prices in a Free Fall”Submitted Amazon’s Glacier secret: BDXL (2014) as a story · 213 points
HN discussionPretty sure Amazon said publicly that they are not using tape for Glacier, I can't find the source except this second hand one: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd...
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “SSD Prices in a Free Fall”Submitted How Doomed is NetApp? as a story · 142 points
HN discussionHere's one theory: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... and here's the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647571 Facebook uses Blu-ray discs with a robotic storage system for its cold storage: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/it-networks/robot-digs-thr...
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “SSD Prices in a Free Fall”Submitted Glacier redux as a story · 124 points
HN discussionIt was never confirmed, but I recall this[1] article making a pretty persuasive case Glacier was using optical disks. [1] https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd...
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “SSD Prices in a Free Fall”Submitted The Storage Tipping Point as a story · 70 points
HN discussionDo we know now how Glacier actually works? Tape robots, spun-down disks, racks of optical media? Best source I could find was: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd...
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “Amazon S3 and Glacier Price Reductions”Submitted Seagate gets hybrid SSD/HDD right as a story · 66 points
HN discussionIt is rumored that Amazon denied that Glacier uses tape. It's still not that clear what it does use. https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... (also read the comments)
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “Amazon S3 and Glacier Price Reductions”Submitted Why did Apple drop ZFS? as a story · 27 points
HN discussionCold storage is probably safe. I've seen the assertion that it's tape from someone who I wouldn't have thought would get it wrong but I'd now bet against it whether or not Amazon's denial seals the deal. Robin Harris has argued in favor of BDXL but he's speculated about a number of things. http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdx... My money would be on the simplest: cold disk. Some support here:…
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “Internetarchive.bak”Submitted How Yahoo can beat Google as a story · 12 points
HN discussionIt all depends on what your definition of "high-volume" is, and just how "archival" your access patterns really are. Amazon Glacier runs on BDXL disc libraries (like a tape library). There's nothing truly expensive about producing BDXL media, there just isn't enough volume in the consumer market to make it worthwhile. If you contract directly with suppliers for a few million discs at a time, that's not an issue (you…
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving (2017)”Submitted RAID is dead. Is it? as a story · 8 points
HN discussionRumor has it Blu-Ray (specifically BDXL): https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... Though a comment on that page mentions this HN comment claiming custom low-speed HDDs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416065
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “Tape still beats SSDs and hard drives when it comes to price per byte”Submitted What you need to know about disk latent sector errors as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> > Retries won't help you when the data was corrupted on its way to be stored. > Why not? 1. Data is fine in memory 2. Data is fine over PCIe. 3. Data is corrupted by firmware bug in storage controller. 4. Data (now corrupted) is sent to disk, which generates checksums for each LBA, and sends the bits to the storage medium. 5. Some time later the data is requested, disk reads bits from sectors, checksums pass, corr…
Comment linking /2007/09/19/cerns-data-corruption-research/
on “What’s New in Apple Filesystems [pdf]”Submitted Google Study On Failure Rates of Cheap Hard Drives as a story · 6 points
HN discussionRAID 6 is not an option with drives big enough because of rebuild time. https://storagemojo.com/2010/02/27/does-raid-6-stops-working...
Comment linking /2010/02/27/does-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/
on “Why use ECC?”Submitted ZFS fight is over [FileSystems] as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> 1) Macs do tend to run hotter than PCs, and this could decrease HDD lifespan. Google found that temperature didn't much matter according to their published research: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf > In the lower and middle temperature ranges, higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates. This is a fairly surprising result, which could indicate that data center or server designe…
Comment linking /2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/
on “New iMacs run fans at full on all drives other than Apple supplied... ”Submitted Protein quantum dot optical next gen storage as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI suspect that Amazon will not only be dropping prices, but will be adding new ways to store data with variable pricing (e.g. new tiers as well as reduced redundancy). Not to mention that if you have 100PB in AWS you might get preferential pricing? Google recently increased their spread and now have 4 tiers. There is also an interesting article about Glacier storage and pricing here https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/2…
Comment linking /2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/
on “AWS Snowmobile – Move Exabytes of Data to the Cloud in Weeks”Submitted The SSD write cliff in real life (2012) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionEMC XtremeIO is giving Pure a strong run for its money. EMC's biggest problem in storage isn't on the All-Flash side (XTremeIO is working as intended), it's that there's fewer reasons to buy the high end, high margin (VMAX) storage these days, and EMC needs to come up with a big margin patch... which it thinks it might have with DSSD [1] [2]. [1] https://storagemojo.com/2014/11/11/pure-vs-emc-whos-winning/ [2] https…
Comment linking /2015/02/18/dssd-hiring-is-exploding/
on “How Doomed is NetApp?”Submitted Bandwidth reduction for erasure coded storage as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
