Yev from Backblaze here -> We have relationships with manufacturers but don't directly buy from them (yet - fingers-crossed). It really is a combination of pric

Yev from Backblaze here -> We have relationships with manufacturers but don't directly buy from them (yet - fingers-crossed). It really is a combination of price/reliability. At our scale we can afford slightly higher failure rates if it means less expensive drives, so our #1 data point for purchases is the cost per gigabyte. After that we do look at failure rates, but unless it's something wildly out of "normal" we tend to live with the occasional failures. Thanks to Vaults the back-end is designed in such a way that if a drive fails we don't have to run and replace it - so individual failures tend not to stress us out too much anymore!