clearly. I'm just saying, it's much easier to design a system where hardware failures cause downtime, and where that downtime is made acceptable because hardware with redundant drives doesn't fail that often than it is to design a system where hardware failures don't cause downtime (and where a failed hard drive causes a full node failure)

Thus, to someone who isn't at scale, the supermicro systems are likely going to be cheaper, overall, than the backblaze pods. (It sounds like these people paid more per disk for the backblaze pods than I'm going to pay for the supermicro pods anyhow.)