How to add 5.5 petabytes and get banned from Costco during a hard drive crisis | Hacker News Reader

How to add 5.5 petabytes and get banned from Costco during a hard drive crisis

gigaom.com

43 pointsbond17 comments

this is spam, go to the original source instead: http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/10/09/backblaze_drive_farming...

edit: the source is much better written too, screw that pathetic gigaom nonsense.

The original is written in a much better style, indeed. I've submitted the story to HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4631027) as well and hope it catches up more than this entry.

So, for lack of a long term plan and bulk-buying arrangements with manufacturers, instead you screwed over all the other customers who wanted to buy a hard drive. Classy. I just can't WAIT for the first major shortage of something significant, like oil, drinkable water, or food.

Even the manufacturers couldn't source them, the drives simple weren't being made.

Beyond having a several month buffer of drives (which they had), what would you suggest they did?

My thoughts exactly. I constantly found empty shelves back then, and while I can't blame that solely on BackBlaze, it doesn't impress me.

Also, why the surprise at the two drive limit? That's an everyday thing in retail channels. I would have expected that sooner.

It sounds like they had bulk-buying arrangements, but their primary suppliers were doubling/tripling prices.

We have shortages of drinkable water and food everyday incidentally.

Why are "external drives" available when there's a shortage of "internal" drives? The hard drives, as the article points out, are the same except in the external case a ... case is added.

It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Do harddrive manufacturers reserve a bunch of drives for the makers of external products (which, often, are branded by the drive makers themselves), which helps ensure that external drives continue to show up?

During the peak prices after the flood, you could still get cheap(er) drives from companies that had long-term fixed-price contracts with the hard drive manufacturers. I'm guessing makers of external drives were one of those.

interestingly, while i was exploiting this same trick for 2.5" drives (for a mini-itx machine with raid), i came across one company that was using "native usb" drives - i opened up the casing to find that the internal drive had a usb port instead of sata! (iirc it was the ones in a nice, soft-touch black rubber case - WD i think?)

No idea but many customers exploited that. The Internet Archive bought a lot and then gave away the enclosures to eg Noisebridge. Google is utterly useless to find photos of it, I remember them being on flickr.

Possibly this?: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gardaud/6922621705/

(FWIW, I searched [flickr "internet archive" external hard drives] to find this)

Yeah! There were also photos of the truck and of their "who needs enclosures" post later.

I would assume every data centre in the land placed huge orders as soon as a shortage became a possibility. Most individuals on the other hand wouldn't have rushed out to Best Buy even if they were aware of the situation!

Why was the primary source of buying HD's initially newegg (online electronics store). If you are in the business of buying SO many HDD's, shouldn't you consider getting them directly from the manufacturers? Also, I would like to know what other techniques they used to find / save space - any special compression software, any techniques to limit the storage of duplicate files, backing up your data to another data centre / on the cloud...

I'm sure they would have been dealing with various distributors to source their drives, but pretty much every one of them will have been saying the same thing "We've got no drives to sell."

Anyone who didn't have a multi-year, multi-million drive deal struggled to get any drives at all, even EMC and HP (who are possibly the number 1 and 2 hard drive buyers in the world) couldn't source drives at their usual prices, and they were definitely buying from the manufacturer.

You can have all the manufacturer direct deals you want, but it doesn't make a difference when the manufacturers factory is under water.

They couldn't compete if they would "back it up on the cloud". They build their own custom storage servers, this way they "can reliably store and retrieve data at up to 25 times lower than the cost of other services such as Amazon S3 by using our own purposed-designed cloud storage". [1]

[1] http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/10/09/backblaze_drive_farming...

If you buy direct from manufacturers you're generally talking about really seriously large sales contracts, which is outside the scope of a small-medium business.

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