They're not buying that many drives. They said they bought 16k drives last year? I can only imaging that Dell, HP, Levovo, etc buy orders of magnitude more drives. I can't imagine that the various HDD makers don't have the capacity to support their volumes. I'm sure they're buying from different channels though.Some manufacturers may not be able to meet their volume demands either.
I also wonder if publishing their reliability info strains any relationship they might have with drive manufacturers.
That's when they were small. I'd like to see a graph of their drive buying numbers per year. I'm sure they could get drives direct now.Consider that after the floods in 2011, these guys were going around to Sam's Club and Costco to buy up local stock so they could de-shell cheap external drives. I'm guessing they're not big enough to get the breaks they want/need directly from drive vendors or top-tier suppliers but too big for retail or consumer supply. I also wonder if publishing their reliability info strains any relationship they might have with drive manufacturers.
What about modern drives; is the 6TB NASD any good?
I do not see HGST 6TB NAS drives listed in their data. I have several in my workstations and they've been fine but I'm a tiny sample.
They cost half as much enterprise drives and fail at a less than 25% (total) rate.I never understand their logic. Does the Backblaze just buy whatever is on sale that week? Most of the cheap drives are not designed for ser multi-disk environment with vibration detection and compensation, so how do they account for that?