How The Hard Drive Crisis Led To One Company Buying Up 5.5PB Of Costco Storage

Flooding in Thailand made getting a hard drive a lot more expensive late last year. It wasn’t a huge deal to most of us, but for a small cloud storage company, it was almost death. Staying alive took creativity. And Costco.

About a year ago, the 3TB internal drives that Blackblaze — which sells unlimited cloud storage for $US5 a month — had been using shot up from about $US130 to $US360. And while the human cost of the floods was enormous, the company also needed to do something to keep itself afloat.

It turned to cheaper external drives. Basically, the answer was to buy the drives, rip them open and stick their guts into the 135TB pods that the company uses — like shucking an oyster. Costco had the best deals, and employees went there to buy 50 or so 3TB external drives at a time. Then things really started to get complicated:

The Two Drive Limit signs started appearing in retail stores in mid-November. At first we didn’t believe them, but we quickly learned otherwise. Sometimes, we talked our way into more, but we heard 2 is the limit a lot. We started doing drive math: 2 drives a day per store, times 3 stores per day, times 5 farmers, times 7 days a week is 210 drives. That would be sufficient, but in reality it didn’t work out that way. Stores were stocking out of drives on a regular basis and we really couldn’t farm everyday, but we kept at it. One Wednesday afternoon, after working all day at Backblaze, Yev circled the San Francisco Bay hitting local Costco and Best Buy stores — 10 stores, 46 drives, 212 miles on his Nissan

— via redwolf.newsvine.com