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How To Add 5.5 Petabytes and Get Banned From Costco
concealment writes with this extract from GigaOm: "'We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.' Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year. Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. 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."
There was flooding in Thailand. Factories were disturbed. This company tried to grab as much of the drives already in the pipeline as it could.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hear the story direct from Backblaze (bonus: goes into more detail).
The real litigious bastards...
Several months ago I met someone from the Internet Archive (archive.org) who told a similar story. The weren't expanding their storage at the same pace as Backblaze, but they were also resorting to shucking external drives to build their rack mounted servers.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
some hard drives (western digital, iirc) are now sold without the sata interface on the drive itself, for external models.
you rip it apart, and find out that you can't stick it onto a sata port...
Honestly, I wouldn't think twice about doing the same thing. They are purchasing the drives, not stealing them. For "some reason" costco is buying them in lots where they can distribute them at that price. I guess they were just leveraging Costco and Best Buy's buying power to keep their business afloat.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.