I have a colleague who works in the industry and purchases a few petabytes of spinning disk a quarter. I love reading the backblaze blogs, and constantly forward them to him. He thinks the backblaze guys are pretty crazy with their "shucking strategy", finds it hard to believe seagate/WD guys will honor warranties on those "shucked" drives, but if they will, all the more power to backblaze.
He does note that his costs per drive didn't go up dramatically after the Thailand floods, and they were pretty close to what backblaze was playing for their "shucked drives" - though, they didn't go down signficantly either.
I'm guessing Backblaze is still at the volume levels where they can't negotiate directly with Drive Vendors - I'm not sure where that level is - 10 Petabbytes/Quarter? 100 Petabytes/quarter?
Regardless, I continue to be very impressed by how backblaze manages to circumvent what others might consider insurmountable hurdles. Truly hacking the system in a good way.
Yev w/ Backblaze here -> Yea unfortunately when we shuck the drives the warranties are voided, but we add that factor in to the costs that we are willing to pay for the hard drives. Truth was, it was cheaper for us to buy the externals and shuck them, even with the voided warranty, than pay the larger fees for internal drives.
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.
As for the negotiation, BrianWski mentioned it in another reply on here, but we keep getting weird answers from vendors and manufacturers. Typically they want a minimum order of about 10,000 hard drives in order to work directly with them and we're simply not willing to buy that many at a time, especially since normally the price goes down monthly, meaning carrying inventory is leaving money on the table.
Love that you enjoy your blog posts, stay tuned ;-)
He does note that his costs per drive didn't go up dramatically after the Thailand floods, and they were pretty close to what backblaze was playing for their "shucked drives" - though, they didn't go down signficantly either.
I'm guessing Backblaze is still at the volume levels where they can't negotiate directly with Drive Vendors - I'm not sure where that level is - 10 Petabbytes/Quarter? 100 Petabytes/quarter?
Regardless, I continue to be very impressed by how backblaze manages to circumvent what others might consider insurmountable hurdles. Truly hacking the system in a good way.