Huh
Time I got a Costco card, then...
When floods hit Thailand last year and crimped the global supply of hard drives, US-based cloud storage company Backblaze feared it would run out of storage. The company's fears weren't unfounded - it uses 50TB a day – so it sensibly tried to buy up as many drives as possible to build a buffer against the shortage. That effort …
"The company has also been good enough to recognise that its difficulties can't be compared to those of the Thai people, and urges a donation to Give2Asia or another charity."
Any fool can go around asking others to give money. Wake me when they make a donation themselves ...
Oddly enough pulling apart externals was exactly what I was advocating on here at the time. The rubberised Freecom drives came apart in seconds with no screwdrivers needed. They were also retailing for a third less than bare drives.
Yes they were only 5400RPM but in the context of my requirements (backup) it didn't really matter.
Was just thinking that, I'm pretty sure a large number of people (including me) were realising just how cheap the external disks were in PC World compared to internal drives via the usual channels. Made for a nice change at least. Probably part of the reason they were also sticking up signs limiting 2 per customer.
On a non-IT related note, coconut milk went through a similar supply shortage.
Yep, did the same when I needed to replace a 1TB internal that started throwing up SMART warnings about a week after the price rises for bare drives took effect at all the usual suppliers... ended up getting a 1TB WD external that was still on special offer at one of the big high-street retailers at the time for less than the price of a bare 1TB drive, opened it up and found that as a bonus I'd got my hands on a Caviar Black Edition as opposed to the Blue or Green I'd have expected to find in an external enclosure...
Subsequently, I've done the same trick to upgrade an old 0.5TB drive to 2TB - IIRC the high-street price of the 2TB external was within a couple of quid of the price of the cheapest internal 2TB I could find online, with the advantage of being available off the shelf on my drive home that evening.
Here is a company that make a good call when it came to a problem.
If i were an investor or shareholder, i would be impressed by the way this company avoided service disruption in a slightly non-standard way.
I don't use them or work for them.
As for @Nicho, at least they didn't make this all about them. They had a supply problem caused by floods, but they worked around it. People lost their lives / livelihoods in Thailand, other companies (or even presidential candidates) would have turned this to a PR stunt.
Maybe they did give money, it would be crass to be public about it.
So we know that the company keeps its prices down by using shonky low end consumer grade disks. Mark my words: This will eventually bite them, badly.
We also know that they are happy to clean out the market for consumers' disks at the point where consumers are going to find it hard enough to source disks in the first place.
I'm not entirely impressed.
Having used "RAID edition" disks which failed when used with a RAID controller - and then had a firmware fix, which required a reformat, and being booted under DOS, without a RAID controlled AND failed to increment the firmware revision number....
In (unmanned (by us) PoPs all round the world? Thanks Western Digital
Buy consumer grade, it's probably cheaper to watch a few fail and rebuild the data than it would be to buy industrial and watch slightly fewer fail and rebuild the data.
The rebuild the data bit is the expensive bit to get right, so the lower cost of disks is probably a good call.
That's exactly what we did. As a RAID system and general storage supplier we had orders to fulfil, and more importantly warranty obligations to our customers. Although the vast majority of our RAIDs use supposedly "server grade" hard disks, it was a case of any port in a storm at one point, and if consumer grade drives filled the hole then consumer grade drives it had to. Naturally the customers were told what the situation was and that we would take responsibility for the warranty.
The biggest problems we had was the extra workload involved with stripping down the external drives, and then the disposal of the of the housing and circuitry that we didn't need.