5 ms·

This is hardly surprising. During my childhood in India, coupons were very rare. This meant that when a coupon did show up, it was usually a great offer and an

This is hardly surprising. During my childhood in India, coupons were very rare. This meant that when a coupon did show up, it was usually a great offer and an enourmous flood of people would rush to cash in. It was common for newspapers to sell out just for a specific coupon. I remember a company introducing a new orange flavored drink coming out with an offer where they'd give the drink for "free" in exchange for x number of oranges. Oranges across the city sold out.

derefr 13y ago
That sounds like a great way to boost a struggling supply chain. I wonder if Backblaze could have done this in 2011 (http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/10/09/backblaze_drive_farming/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/10/09/backblaze_drive_farming...) -- instead of buying huge numbers of drives themselves, getting customers to buy them and mail them in in exchange for cheaper storage.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Not sure I would trust an hard drive bought and mailed by any random person, though. Maybe an SSD.
  - lsc 13y ago
    I'm in that situation now (hurting for expansion capital, in part to buy hard drives) so I've thought a little bit about it. If it was just a packing problem, it's easy enough for me to ship you an empty hard drive mailing carton with pre-paid return postage. As for SSDs, well, I'm generally more suspicious of SSDs. They are more shock resistant, but I've got north of a decade watching how hard drives fail. I've got a reasonable feel for it. SSDs? I am less familiar with. They /do/ fail just like any other drive; not only after you've written them X times. (I mean, they have that problem, too... but this idea that a ssd is more reliable because it's got no moving parts is bunk. You still need your raid.) The problem I see is twofold. 1. if I'm buying thousands of hard drives, I can probably get 'em cheaper than you can. and 2. if we're talking any hard drive you have laying about, (in which case, yeah, it might be 'cheaper' in that you don't want the hard drive anymore, and the effort of selling it is a large portion of it's value) well, then you have the problem of a bunch of different kinds of hard drives, which increases the complexity of your system. Now, you could make some sort of minimum requirements (e.g. must be from vendor X, Y or Z, must be at least 7200rpm, must be at least 3tb, must be 'raid edition' etc...) and that /might/ work... it'd still be hard to overcome problem 1. (I suppose it would be a reasonable way to exploit 'loss leader' 'limit one' sales, but those are mostly for consumer-grade drives.)
    - cbeach 13y ago
      I'm just one data point, but the Samsung SSD in my Macbook Pro failed after 13 months. They're no panacea. By the way, Apple replaced it free of charge, outside warranty.
      - lsc 13y ago
        it's seriously out of warranty after 13 months? that... seems kinda crazy to me. Even consumer-grade spinning rust has a good 3 year warranty. 5 years for enterprise. http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage/MZ-7PD512BW-specs http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage/MZ-7PD512B... Yup, looks like the samsung pro stuff also has a three year warranty.
        _delirium 13y ago
        Apple handles the warranty in a unified way (branded as "AppleCare"): Apple parts & labor warranty for the whole device, but no separate warranties for parts (you aren't even supposed to know what many of the parts are, or get it serviced by anyone except Apple). The default Apple warranty is 1 year, though you can pay extra for a 3-year one.
    - e12e 13y ago
      I'd be more worried about being able to verify the firmware on the drives. Perhaps choosing to allow only drives you know how to (re)flash yourself?
    - VLM 13y ago
      One interesting thing about SSDs that you probably don't know about because you self declare as not being a SSD guy, is many (most?) of plain flash memory cards (camera cards, etc) sold non-retail aka ebay, CL, etc have their bios modified to report a larger amount of memory than they actually have. So you pay for and buy a "16 GB" SD from some guy on CL and its actually a 4 GB modified to report its a 16. It actually works until you try to put more than 4 GB on it. If you buy from a reputable dealer, at least if you get ripped off it'll probably be easy to swap. I strongly suspect a similar market will shortly exist for aged out SSD. Once a SSD dies, simply modify its bios to report its brand new and error free, and sell it at full price on CL / ebay / etc. I can't say I've ever heard a report of this kind of behavior in old fashioned rotating rust hard drives. Then again the major manufacturers all have some story or another about shipping broken garbage fresh from the factory, they don't need additional crooks to rip off the endusers. One "obvious" startup idea is no one who knows anything about RAID ever voluntarily builds an array with identical models / sequential serial numbers. However that is the only way big integrators will ship servers. I'd be willing to eat a modest fee (aka a profit for a startup) for someone, somehow, to help me end up with an array of extremely non-identical drives. I have no idea how to work this. A swap operation? A trading site? Maybe if you assume you want to replace an entire array every X years, and you've got Y drives, a subscription service sends you (Y/X) "currently top of the line" drives per year and you swap them in and expand the array as possible, as now unused space becomes available? There's subscription services for everything from "fruit of the month" to "mens underwear" so I think there's a possibility for raid admins to subscribe and save a new drive every 3 months or whatever, and due to labor costs of failure, businesses are not going to flip out at a somewhat higher profit margin. The killer problem with a subscription startup service like this would be customer support handing turnover at the enduser aka mailing address, and publicity. This service might exist, or existed in the past, but I've been in the biz a long time and never heard of it, so I find that highly unlikely unless the one attempt years ago was an epic fail. Aside from big biz, at least some small admins would subscribe, so don't forget about us guys with TB scale mythtv installations at home. I mirror and would like a yearly replacement cycle (because I have the dough and don't enjoy recovery as a hobby) so send me a top of the line big SATA every six months for 10%, do all the research (maybe burn-in testing) to save me the time, and I'll not blink at a "modest" markup, say under 100%.
  - hobs 13y ago
    Interestingly enough, when backblaze started having trouble purchasing hard drives during the flood, I am fairly certain they enlisted friends and family across the country to buy them harddrives from places such as costco. >Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army.
altero 13y ago
> drink for "free" in exchange for x number of oranges Why just not eat the oranges?
- zedai 13y ago
  Because people drink coke instead of drinking water with sugar mixed.
- afandian 13y ago
  I think the answer to that is the answer to the question of why any sugary soft drink exists at all.
alina24 13y ago
Reminded me of Mirinda
san86 13y ago
If I am not mistaken, the drink was "Crush".
- badclient 13y ago
  Yup!

derefr 13y ago

That sounds like a great way to boost a struggling supply chain. I wonder if Backblaze could have done this in 2011 (http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/10/09/backblaze_drive_farming/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/10/09/backblaze_drive_farming...) -- instead of buying huge numbers of drives themselves, getting customers to buy them and mail them in in exchange for cheaper storage.

icebraining 13y ago
Not sure I would trust an hard drive bought and mailed by any random person, though. Maybe an SSD.
- lsc 13y ago
  I'm in that situation now (hurting for expansion capital, in part to buy hard drives) so I've thought a little bit about it. If it was just a packing problem, it's easy enough for me to ship you an empty hard drive mailing carton with pre-paid return postage. As for SSDs, well, I'm generally more suspicious of SSDs. They are more shock resistant, but I've got north of a decade watching how hard drives fail. I've got a reasonable feel for it. SSDs? I am less familiar with. They /do/ fail just like any other drive; not only after you've written them X times. (I mean, they have that problem, too... but this idea that a ssd is more reliable because it's got no moving parts is bunk. You still need your raid.) The problem I see is twofold. 1. if I'm buying thousands of hard drives, I can probably get 'em cheaper than you can. and 2. if we're talking any hard drive you have laying about, (in which case, yeah, it might be 'cheaper' in that you don't want the hard drive anymore, and the effort of selling it is a large portion of it's value) well, then you have the problem of a bunch of different kinds of hard drives, which increases the complexity of your system. Now, you could make some sort of minimum requirements (e.g. must be from vendor X, Y or Z, must be at least 7200rpm, must be at least 3tb, must be 'raid edition' etc...) and that /might/ work... it'd still be hard to overcome problem 1. (I suppose it would be a reasonable way to exploit 'loss leader' 'limit one' sales, but those are mostly for consumer-grade drives.)
  - cbeach 13y ago
    I'm just one data point, but the Samsung SSD in my Macbook Pro failed after 13 months. They're no panacea. By the way, Apple replaced it free of charge, outside warranty.
    - lsc 13y ago
      it's seriously out of warranty after 13 months? that... seems kinda crazy to me. Even consumer-grade spinning rust has a good 3 year warranty. 5 years for enterprise. http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage/MZ-7PD512BW-specs http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage/MZ-7PD512B... Yup, looks like the samsung pro stuff also has a three year warranty.
      - _delirium 13y ago
        Apple handles the warranty in a unified way (branded as "AppleCare"): Apple parts & labor warranty for the whole device, but no separate warranties for parts (you aren't even supposed to know what many of the parts are, or get it serviced by anyone except Apple). The default Apple warranty is 1 year, though you can pay extra for a 3-year one.
  - e12e 13y ago
    I'd be more worried about being able to verify the firmware on the drives. Perhaps choosing to allow only drives you know how to (re)flash yourself?
  - VLM 13y ago
    One interesting thing about SSDs that you probably don't know about because you self declare as not being a SSD guy, is many (most?) of plain flash memory cards (camera cards, etc) sold non-retail aka ebay, CL, etc have their bios modified to report a larger amount of memory than they actually have. So you pay for and buy a "16 GB" SD from some guy on CL and its actually a 4 GB modified to report its a 16. It actually works until you try to put more than 4 GB on it. If you buy from a reputable dealer, at least if you get ripped off it'll probably be easy to swap. I strongly suspect a similar market will shortly exist for aged out SSD. Once a SSD dies, simply modify its bios to report its brand new and error free, and sell it at full price on CL / ebay / etc. I can't say I've ever heard a report of this kind of behavior in old fashioned rotating rust hard drives. Then again the major manufacturers all have some story or another about shipping broken garbage fresh from the factory, they don't need additional crooks to rip off the endusers. One "obvious" startup idea is no one who knows anything about RAID ever voluntarily builds an array with identical models / sequential serial numbers. However that is the only way big integrators will ship servers. I'd be willing to eat a modest fee (aka a profit for a startup) for someone, somehow, to help me end up with an array of extremely non-identical drives. I have no idea how to work this. A swap operation? A trading site? Maybe if you assume you want to replace an entire array every X years, and you've got Y drives, a subscription service sends you (Y/X) "currently top of the line" drives per year and you swap them in and expand the array as possible, as now unused space becomes available? There's subscription services for everything from "fruit of the month" to "mens underwear" so I think there's a possibility for raid admins to subscribe and save a new drive every 3 months or whatever, and due to labor costs of failure, businesses are not going to flip out at a somewhat higher profit margin. The killer problem with a subscription startup service like this would be customer support handing turnover at the enduser aka mailing address, and publicity. This service might exist, or existed in the past, but I've been in the biz a long time and never heard of it, so I find that highly unlikely unless the one attempt years ago was an epic fail. Aside from big biz, at least some small admins would subscribe, so don't forget about us guys with TB scale mythtv installations at home. I mirror and would like a yearly replacement cycle (because I have the dough and don't enjoy recovery as a hobby) so send me a top of the line big SATA every six months for 10%, do all the research (maybe burn-in testing) to save me the time, and I'll not blink at a "modest" markup, say under 100%.
- hobs 13y ago
  Interestingly enough, when backblaze started having trouble purchasing hard drives during the flood, I am fairly certain they enlisted friends and family across the country to buy them harddrives from places such as costco. >Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army.

altero 13y ago

> drink for "free" in exchange for x number of oranges Why just not eat the oranges?

zedai 13y ago
Because people drink coke instead of drinking water with sugar mixed.
afandian 13y ago
I think the answer to that is the answer to the question of why any sugary soft drink exists at all.

alina24 13y ago

Reminded me of Mirinda

san86 13y ago

If I am not mistaken, the drink was "Crush".

badclient 13y ago
Yup!