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."

Comments

What a bunch of douche bags

[serviscope_minor]

Seriously, what a bunch of assholes.

So instead of doing the capitalistic thing and gouging with insanely high prices, the shops instead started rationing drives for a sane price so everyone could get a little bit of the very limited supply.

That was actually a really good thing to do. Instead of profiteering, they tried to make the best of a bad situation for everyone.

Then a bunch of dicks like this figure that they're more important than everyone else and that they should be able to get more than enyone else.

Selfish bastards. Nothing but scum.

After reading this I will not be giving them my money.

I don't get it

[JobyOne]

I'm confused. Was Costco selling these drives at a loss or something, just to get people in the door?

I can't think of many good reasons that they would look at customers coming in and buying assloads of their merchandise and say "NO! Get out of here and don't buy stuff from us ever again!"

Re:Wow

[vlm]

Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.

Run the numbers. 50 TB a day sounds like a lot, if they've only got one customer. But they're probably got "a zillion" which would imply your very thin slice of the upload bandwidth is going to be choked to like a gig per day. The upgrade in my basement from (full) 1 TB drives to 2 TB drives took around overnight, less than 24 hours anyway, but over the net at a gig per day would be about 3 years to fully convert. Even if they're not limited I would have serious problems shoving more than 100 gigs/day thru my cablemodem, so thats at least 10 days.

Another interesting thing to analyze is $5/month is $60/yr, so subtract $5/yr for electricity to spin a drive, assume a drive lives 2 years (probably much longer) that means if you can buy a drive big enough to hold everything you want for less than $110, just stick a drive in your basement. Better bandwidth and latency too, I have gigE at home but only ten or so megs of cablemodem. $110 at tiger direct will get me 2 TB. So 2 TB is approximately the tipping point, use less and you're better off "self hosting" in the basement, use more and you're better off using their service (and they're likely losing money if you use more than 2 TB).

Also I'm curious if its "unlimited" like cellphone or internet access is "unlimited" in other words they'll cut you off if they're losing money on you.

Re:House burns down?

[xaxa]

I would say at your parent's house

That's exactly what I've done. I set up some scripts to rsync data from my computer to a server in my mum's garage, and also the reverse.

That way, we both have important data (mostly photos) backed up off-site in different cities, and the photos are available to browse through a web interface.

but this being slashdot that's probably not offsite.

A friend went with an encrypted backup program, and set up more-or-less the same thing with another friend.