Need a bit of extra storage space? Consider building a 480-terabyte Backblaze Storage Pod 6.0, which crams 60 hard drives into a 4U chassis.
How is that kind of storage even possible? You can download the CAD files for the Pod right here and find out. Follow them, and for $16,300 you can fill a rack with 8TB Seagate SMR drives, giving you 480TB for $0.036 per gigabyte, ExtremeTech reported. It’s a great design, but just as remarkable is the demonstration of how affordable hard drives have become. Obviously it’s not intended for home use, but isn’t is just fun to imagine building? Scroll through the designs and drool a little.
Backblaze is a cloud storage and backup company that hosts 200 million gigabytes of files, and you don’t share that many files without learning a thing or two about building servers. The company open sources its hardware designs, meaning anyone who wants to build a version of them is permitted to. Over the years universities, businesses, and a few hobbyists have taken advantage of various incarnations of the Pod.
The Backblaze Pod 6.0 is new this week, and it’s impressive. The design crams 60 hard drives into a 4U chassis, yet still keeps factors like heat and performance in check. Details like SATA cables needed to be obsessed over. Backblaze can build one of its units for under $9,000, which plays no small part of why it can offer unlimited file storage for $5 a month.
The company uses consumer-grade drives instead of enterprise ones, and accounts for drive failures by ensuring there’s enough redundancy to avoid data loss. Because of this, Backblaze’s annual reports on drive reliability are a must-read for any hardware enthusiast.
Backblaze, it needs to be stated, does not sell Pods directly: It’s a cloud company, not a hardware one. Anyone who wants a Pod needs to build it themselves, or find a third-party vendor who picks up the design and sells versions of it. And while most of us don’t need this kind of storage, it’s a pretty amazing example of what’s possible.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.