5 ms·
This is the same company who came to the conclusion it was cheaper to send people to costco to buy hard drives and manually remove them from enclosures than jus
by eterm 11y ago
This is the same company who came to the conclusion it was cheaper to send people to costco to buy hard drives and manually remove them from enclosures than just negotiate with a vendor[1].
They reckoned they bought 5.5 petabytes of data at retail prices. I've always taken what they say with a grain of salt.
[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/
- guipsp 11y agoYou are taking it out of context, this was during the global hard drive crisis. It was cheaper because costco didn't adjust their prices to account for the crisis.
- brianwawok 11y agoSeems pretty creative to me.
- lultimouomo 11y agoI've always wondered how they kept the accounting for the money spend on driver bought by family members etc. My CPA would not like that.
- icedchai 11y ago"Receipts." Have you heard of them?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- outworlder 11y agoDid you happen to miss the part that says that all vendors had tripled their prices because of the Thailand flood? > Over the next few days prices spiked in all of our traditional purchasing channels, They were grabbing existing stock from stores which had not raised their prices yet, even if they were limiting the amount of drives per customer. > In addition to the price of the drive there were now extra costs to shuck the drives, extra costs to recycle the shucked parts, and once shucked we couldn’t return a bad drive, but it was still less expensive than buying internal drives even if we could find them They did factor costs into account. This was an emergency situation, they never said that's how they do business normally.
- atYevP 11y agoYev from Backblaze here -> Unfortunately we aren't large enough to negotiate with hard drive manufacturers. We've tried, believe me, but since we're not putting in order of 10,000 drives at a time, they refuse to speak with us. The closest we get is an introduction to their preferred vendor channels, but we have to go through them like anyone else. At the time we did the "farming" it was because those channels had dried up and risen in price by almost 3x, and we were faced with going out of business or getting creative. I assure you, we would RATHER work with manufacturers directly, but it's not as easy as calling up Seagate and asking for a bunch of drives on the cheap (especially when computer companies like Dell and Apple need those drives to make THEIR product lines works). They can raise prices of their computers by a few dollars and not really feel an impact, we can't!