In the previous story, user brianwski of Backblaze said, "We have been told that until we buy blocks of 10,000 drives, we cannot deal directly with the drive manufacturers. We're not there yet."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4633213

brianwski from Backblaze here again - this reminds me to check once again on this info. We heard a rumor that the number of drives might be lower because we only buy the largest and most expensive drive. The 10,000 number might be a rule of thumb for a retailer like Radio Shack that stocks a blend of different drive sizes.

With all that said, EVERY MONTH we bid 20 different suppliers against each other and choose the lowest price. For goodness sake, anybody on earth who wants free money just has to undercut the other suppliers by 1 penny and you'll win our business. Always open to new suppliers, please, take our money!!

Slightly off topic but similar, a friend and I tend to have a frustrating talk about some company (startups and old stable businesses alike) who fails to successfully take our money once every week or two. Seriously people, just ask people for their money and then freaking make it easy to do. That's all. It isn't that hard. I want to give you money. Please, let me give you money.

Cool.

I know a few Backblaze people are reading/posting in these comments, so I'll ask here:

Do you guys know the approximate price of when you can purchase them direct in 10,000 blocks?

I'm not at Backblaze, but when I was at Google I did know what Google was paying for drives direct from the manufacturer and it was not as much lower than the distributor price as you might expect. Margins are pretty thin in the disk drive business.

Yev from Backblaze here -> It really depends on the type of drive. One of the reasons we don't currently buy in chunks of 10,000 is that we like to forecast how many drives we'll need and not keep a bunch of inventory (if you look at the graphs, you'll see that prices used to drop a little bit each month, so keeping excess inventory was like leaving money on the table).

But they claim to have added 50 Petabytes of storage in 2 years, which surely runs to over 10K drives per year.

It's a cool story but something just doesn't add up here.

(I work at Backblaze.) We buy our drives once per month right now. This is an improvement over the early days where we were so strapped for cash we bought twice a month. :-)

We're building and deploying 17 pods this month, each pod has 45 drives, so we purchased 765 drives this month (plus replacements for failed drives that are out of warranty, etc). So if we would buy 13 months of drives all in one purchase, we might be able to go direct.

THE TRADEOFF (Gamble?) is that drive prices drop every month, so stockpiling a year worth of drives (even at a 10 percent discount) would lose us money. Before the Thailand drive crisis we had a rule of thumb that drive prices dropped 4 percent each month. But this is just a judgement call, your guess is as good as mine whether this makes sense. We're figuring this out like everybody else.

Sounds like you need a hard drive futures market. :)

I'd be willing to bet you wish you'd have purchased 10k drives in August 2011.

Good lord yes. Before the drive crisis we were smug and confident and everything was operating smoothly and according to plan, we just couldn't even imagine what could possibly go wrong. Yep, and we bought our drives JUST in time, the longer you delay the purchase the lower the cost the higher the profit.

What did Andy Grove say? "Only the paranoid survive." Now we run a larger buffer of drives.

If we had the extra cash reserves...yup :)

First of all, 50 PB is less than 20K 3TB drives. Second, they don't buy a year's supply at once.