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Comment by bruceboughton | Hacker News Reader

If BackBlaze are adding 50TB of data a day, are they really buying drives from NewEgg?

A few months ago I wanted to buy 1000 Microsoft Lifecam Cinema HD webcams. I could order them individually from Amazon for £27 each with free delivery.

I phoned up all the official Microsoft distributors in my country, who phoned up Microsoft and whatnot. Not one of them could offer me a price below about £35. And getting in contact with Microsoft hardware directly? Ha, I should be so lucky.

A few months ago I wanted to buy 1000 Microsoft Lifecam Cinema HD webcams.

I'll bite. Why? :)

Asked to quote to make a system like [1] for a fleet of 1000 vans. Buying in USB cameras would reduce engineering costs compared to making our own. Eventually went for a brand that cost less and could accept wide angle lenses.

[1] http://www.smartdrive.net

More often than not it's a case of who you know when it comes to stuff like this.

(Backblaze engineer here.) We have been told that until we buy blocks of 10,000 drives, we cannot deal directly with the drive manufacturers. We're not there yet, thus we NORMALLY bid out each drive purchase (about one large order per month) to four or five regular "resellers" and "distributors" like CDW, Ingram, B&H, etc and take the best price that month. We were down at $90 or so for individual Hitachi 3 TBytes at the low point before the crisis. We're currently paying around $160 from CDW and friends and we can afford that without raising our prices. During the Thailand flood crisis, CDW offered "not enough drives" (half our order) for $350 per drive. We said "no", because we couldn't afford "yes". :-)

Anybody can win our business by under bidding the other resellers, and we're ALWAYS open to suggestions. If you know any way to achieve lower drive prices, let us know! PLEASE!!

That's one of the things that caught my attention as well. It seems strange, I would've imagined that at 50TB/day (~500 x 3TB HDDs/month) they could get a nice deal with a direct importer. I guess there is a small PR twist to the whole story ;-) with newegg being a well-known name.

I don't know if the 50TB/day figure includes the replacement drives or only expanding the capacity as I guess their failure rate is quite high.

edit: fixed a typo.

My guess would be that the 50TB/day figure is before de-duplication and not at all relevant to the actual storage, but even at 10% of that I would expect them to be sourcing them wholesale, not retail.

In fact, this whole article is making me doubt my faith in Backblaze as an off-site backup solution.

I remember a reddit AMA where they mentioned that they don't actually do any de-duplication. This isn't Dropbox and nowhere as reliable as S3 - its literally as if you're renting remote consumer external drives for offsite backup, for that usage pattern Backblaze makes some sense.

And those pods are cool. But I agree, a somewhat flawed approach.

I don't think it should be assumed that there is no data redundancy between pods, afterall from prior blog posts it seems like the pods can be taken offline. I'd also posit that a properly constructed RAID array can mitigate the risks of using consumer parts; afterall that is the "I" in RAID.

>This isn't Dropbox and nowhere as reliable as S3 - its literally as if you're renting remote consumer external drives for offsite backup

What are their reliability promises? I think that they're doing some mirroring of the data, but I'm still not sure about the rest of their service details.

I'm considering using them for backups, but have not decided yet.

I came upon this [1] discussion here, from 3 years ago. I'm diving in :)

Yeah, the pods are really sweet and they provide all the design documents [2]!

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803136

[2]: http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...

edit: added additional details about the design

NewEgg isn't just retail anymore. They have a 'NewEgg Business' program with pretty solid volume discounts.

I don't understand this comment at all. If anything, it has redoubled my interest in remaining a (paying) customer of BackBlaze. Look at the lengths they will go to securing drives so that I can continue to have stupid-cheap backup!

I can't ask for more.

And realistically, if push comes to shove, I'm sure BackBlaze would send out a heartfelt email to their loyal customers explaining the situation and kindly requesting a price increase. Especially after reading a post like the one they just submitted...I'm sure no one would have a problem ponying up a few more dollars.

Why not let NewEgg hold the inventory if their prices are good?

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