Yev from Backblaze here -> since we've always used consumer level gear and actually designed our storage pods around them, we factored higher failure rates and inconsistencies in to the equations. We know that drives fail (this is why we started an online backup company), and we designed around it so that even if we lose drives or entire arrays, it isn't fatal to the storage. You can read the philosophy here (http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/).
Yev w/ Backblaze here -> Even though we did not prevent people from purchasing drives (we rarely bought ALL of the drives within any given location, and if so, it was before a shipment was delivered), a lot of our users were able to backup to us for $5/month instead of purchasing a higher price drive do backup to locally, then when prices started going down they were able to purchase the local drive as well.
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Hey! I wrote a blog post about that once -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Yev from Backblaze here -> since we've always used consumer level gear and actually designed our storage pods around them, we factored higher failure rates and inconsistencies in to the equations. We know that drives fail (this is why we started an online backup company), and we designed around it so that even if we lose drives or entire arrays, it isn't fatal to the storage. You can read the philosophy here (http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/).
Yev w/ Backblaze here -> Even though we did not prevent people from purchasing drives (we rarely bought ALL of the drives within any given location, and if so, it was before a shipment was delivered), a lot of our users were able to backup to us for $5/month instead of purchasing a higher price drive do backup to locally, then when prices started going down they were able to purchase the local drive as well.