I mean "doing it well for an influencer and shafting everyone else" is far cheaper and easier than just making a solid and reliable product consistently. That's such old-fashioned thinking these days. :)
I don't know if they're as budget-conscious as they used to be, but Backblaze used to "shuck" drives from externals because they're cheaper [1].
If this is still the case, then their stats should be similar to hobbyists who are doing this too.
> While the shucked drives might not have had the warranties
We haven't shucked drives in a while. The main advantage was when this artificial price difference that occurred in the Thailand drive crisis where a "raw drive" cost $400, but if it was put inside a $7 USB enclosure the same drive including the USB enclosure suddenly only cost $200. At the time, our business model literally wouldn't survive the cost increase, it was shuck drives or go out of business. :-) We assume the issue was that mostly "rich companies" bought "raw drives" and could afford the increase in price, but "poor consumers" bought drives in USB enclosures and couldn't afford the increase.
We still watch the prices though. You can think of it this way: if 3% of the drives fail but don't have a warranty because they were shucked, then we have to save more than 3% (plus the cost of the "shucking" process) to make it worth it. That rarely happens anymore. I think partly because as the volume of drives that we purchase has gone up we have the ability to get better "bulk discounts" than we had in the earliest days. Also, the process of "drive farming" where the retail stores would limit it to "2 per customer" or whatever would get much harder at our current scale.
Exactly, as we just saw with the Western Digital debacle.
The unfortunate reality is, only a fortuneteller can say what the best hard drive to buy right now is.