Yev from Backblaze here -> Personally, I think that the biggest part of the is price sensitivity. External drives are geared towards consumers, who simply will

Yev from Backblaze here -> Personally, I think that the biggest part of the is price sensitivity. External drives are geared towards consumers, who simply will not buy the drives if they go up too much in cost. The internal drives we were buying are targeted at business' who have a choice to make, either buy at the higher price, go out of business, or get creative. We try to go the go creative route because we really don't want to go out of business, and paying the higher prices for drives, especially in this case, would have gotten us there. Backblaze tries to avoid the "enterprise tax" as often as we can, and internal vs. external drives are just another example of how "enterprise-grade" items get marked up because the target market will pay for it.