Great article. Very interesting and informative. The ingenuity and flexibility seen here becomes increasingly rare as companies get larger. One of the few perks of being relatively small. They sound like a pretty good company.

 

I already use, and need, a more feature-rich option (SugarSync currently, but I'll switch back to SpiderOak when their software shapes up a little better), but I really respect their flexibility. That's everything thats right about a small, entrepreneurial companies.

 

Holy crap, 3000 hdds per month?

I really wonder what is the hdd failure rate for them.

 

Google did a study on drive failure rates a few years ago, looking at data from over a hundred thousand of their HDDs. They found that annualized failure rates were 1.8% for drives less than 1 year old and 8.6% for drives less than 3 years old.

There are a lot of factors to consider and those numbers might not perfectly reflect failures for consumers, but it's definitely the most comprehensive look at failure rates I know of.

Here's the study (pdf) http://static.googleusercontent.com...ch.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf

 

I will have to admit I am more than a little surprised that a cloud storage service is using consumer grade hard drives. Yes they are cheaper, but the high cost will be a significant data loss if they are using the drives in any sort of a raid storage scheme. If they are simply duplicating data in multiple places, then it doesn't seem like quite as horrible of an idea. Kind of makes you wonder if they are not also using UPS's from Best Buy or Radio Shack batteries. If you want a cheap cloud storage service, then that's what you get, a cheap service.