Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand drive crisis

what happened to the post that raised ethical questions about this? i think it had a valid point.<p>the hard drive shortage hit us all. this one company coordinated a mass buying operation from commercial stores when the rest of use were looking for personal use.<p>while i don't think this is illegal, it doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy inside either.<p>when there's a shortage, the "noise" in traditional distribution means that small buyers (like me, and many others) can still find what we need if we put in some extra effort. it functions like a "soft buffer", making the transition to a complete lack of resources more gradual. action like this removes that buffer.<p>this feels like one group of people - driven by their desire to do business - beat out a load of other people who didn't have the same logistical resources. there's something uncool about it. i am not sure i have explained very well, but it's to do with crossing the line from business to personal.<p>[edit: ah, thanks - separate thread: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4630910" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4630910</a>]<p>[edit2: wtf? i thought someone replied here? was about to upvote you. thanks anyway.]

The fact that external drives that have to be "shucked" of their casing and circuit boards (at what environmental expense?) were cheaper than the same internal drives makes you wonder whether the internal drive prices were realistic.<p>It can't be cheaper to produce the external drives, so the internal drive prices must have been raised above the actual cost to the manufacturers, presumably because the internal drive demand was guaranteed. Consumers might hold off purchasing an external disk if the prices doubled, but Apple aren't going to stop selling Macs because of it.<p>Sometimes capitalism isn't perfect.

We had this problem at rsync.net ... the price of our main consumable tripling overnight, etc.<p>We really never considered "shucking" external drives, since the drives inside these enclosures are the worst spec'd, highest failure rate drives ... never mind the (usually) nonsensical enterprise vs. non-enterprise, they're just crummy drives.<p>Good for BB for making it work ...<p>BTW, hard drive price weirdness continues to this day - 3TB Hitachi enterprise drives two months ago were $198 (or so) and last week they were $248 (or so).

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

If I were their customer, I would be looking for alternatives right about now...

same news ; and comments:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4630910" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4630910</a>

I wonder if the hard drive manufacturers will reconsider locating their entire supply chain in a third world country with frequent natural disasters after this incident. With rising wages in the third world and stagnating wages in America, perhaps the financial benefits of outsourcing aren't so apparent anymore.

Now that's a startup story. Backblaze has some of the best down home old fashioned spit n glue startup stories on hacker news. Like the one where they invented their own storage pod out of commodity components to beat amazon's pricing. And now this stay-alive-against-all-odds story. Fantastic.

I was impressed with the effort to get those drives. If the massive companies who produce hard drives were unprepared for such a natural disaster I can't say I expect more from a small company.

Their execution was poor. Start by depleting SF and then look elsewhere? Short-sighted at best.<p>They should have moved quickly before Best Buy/Costco implemented constraints that should have been anticipated. During one weekend, via train or one-way flights, employees could have been mobilized to cities across the US. Utilizing USPS flat rate boxes or low-cost equivalent, hard drives could have been shipped back to HQ en masse. Three days, disaster is over.<p>I give them a C- on execution.