Blackblaze claims to have achieved upload speeds on its B2 Cloud Storage platform that are up to 30% faster than AWS S3 by tapping into a “shard stash” based on solid-state drives (SSDs).
When customers previously uploaded small files to Blackblaze B2, the data was written to several hard drives, and these had to be completed before returning a response to the client. But data is now written to HDDs as well as some SSDs – known as the ‘shard stash’ at the same time. The SSD-held data is stored only until HDDs have received all the data, after which point these copies are deleted. Since uploading to the SSD is much faster than the HDD, the result is faster uploads.
