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Comment by zaidmo | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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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