Top Five Blog Posts of 2015

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In 2015, over two million people visited the Backblaze blog. Thank you. Of the 94 blog posts we published in 2015, the following were the five most popular. As you take stock of 2015 and plan for 2016, we invite you to enjoy these posts and subscribe to our blog to receive even more great content in the coming year.

Number Five: “Don’t Build a Billion Dollar Business

Our CEO penned this post, which addresses the realities of building a company. If having a billion dollar business is your only metric, you should know that 99.995% of funded companies don’t reach that lofty goal. There is a better way.

Link: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/dont-build-a-billion-dollar-business-really

Number Four: Storage Pods

Over the years, our blog posts on our Storage Pods have always been popular. This year was no exception. Our original “Petabytes on a Budget” post from 2009 still leads the way, but all the other Storage Pod posts still finished high on our list.

All the Storage Pod posts are listed here: https://www.backblaze.com/storage-pod.html

Number Three: Our Troubles With Seagate 3TB Hard Drives

In October 2015, we completed the removal from our data center of the last of the 4,289 Seagate 3TB drives we had previously purchased and deployed. This post describes our trials and tribulations with these drives. On the other hand, the 29,024 Seagate 4TB drives we own are performing quite nicely.

Link: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure

Number Two: Backblaze Vaults

We introduced Backblaze Vaults in March of 2015 and the interest grew from there. A follow up post on our building and open-sourcing our own Reed-Solomon encoding was also popular, with the source-code being downloaded over 1,000 times from our website or from GitHub.

Backblaze Vault Post: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture

Number One: Hard Drive Stats

The most popular topic on our blog in 2015 was the hard drive statistics we publish each quarter. Over time, the most recent post works it’s way up the popularity list, but all of the hard drive stats posts are near the top in popularity. Right now, the Q1 2015 post is the most popular, but that’s sure to change, so we’ve listed all the recent Hard Drive Stats posts below.

    • Q3 2015:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015

    • Q2 2015:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015

    • Q1 2015:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q1-2015

    • Q4 2014:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive-q4-2014

Also, check out our hard drive overview webpage for reliability data, drive farming stories, and more.

Thanks again for a great year and best wishes in 2016.

About Andy Klein

Andy Klein is the Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller at Backblaze. He has over 25 years of experience in technology marketing and during that time, he has shared his expertise in cloud storage and computer security at events, symposiums, and panels at RSA, SNIA SDC, MIT, the Federal Trade Commission, and hundreds more. He currently writes and rants about drive stats, Storage Pods, cloud storage, and more.