Why Facebook is stockpiling Blu-ray discs
Found on CNN on Saturday, 23 August 2014
Facebook is now experimenting with a storage prototype that uses racks of Blu-ray discs instead of hard drives. The discs are held in groups of 12 in locked cartridges and are extracted by a robotic arm whenever they're needed.
For one thing, the discs are more resilient: they're water- and dust-resistant, and better able to withstand temperature swings.
Because the Blu-ray system doesn't need to be powered when the discs aren't in use, it uses 80% less power than the hard-drive arrangement, cutting overall costs in half.
Water- and dust-resistant sounds nice until you realize that they are still stored in a datacenter, surrounded by robotics for accessing them; there's reasonable doubt that those robots are water- and dust-resitant too, so that can't be the killer argument. Obviously Facebook does something terribly wrong, because (at least here) harddrives can be powered off when they aren't used. Those arguments just don't make any sense.