Flooding in Thailand made develop a intemperate drive a wad more expensive late last year . It was n’t a Brobdingnagian deal to most of us , but for a small swarm storage company , it was almost dying . stay alive took creativity . And Costco .
About a yr ago , the 3 TB national drive that Backblaze — which sells unlimited cloud memory for $ 5 a month — had been using shot up from about $ 130 to $ 360 . And while the human toll of the inundation was enormous , the fellowship also needed to do something to keep itself afloat .
It turned to cheaper extraneous thrust . fundamentally , the answer was to buy the drives , rip them capable , and stick their intestine into the 135 TB “ pod ” that the company practice — like shucking an oyster , or ripping open a Claratin D parcel to make up some shabu . Best Buy and Costco were the skilful spate , and employees lead off driving out and buying 50 or so 3 TB externals at a time . Then thing really pop out to get complicated :
The “ Two Drive Limit ” signs started appearing in retail store in mid - November . At first we did n’t believe them , but we quickly learned otherwise . Sometimes , we babble out our direction into more , but we heard “ 2 is the limit ” a lot . We started doing “ drive mathematics ” : 2 drives a twenty-four hour period per store , time 3 store per day , times 5 “ farmers ” , times 7 days a week is 210 drives . That would be sufficient , but in reality it did n’t work out that way . shop were stocking out of drives on a regular basis and we really could n’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 fund , 46 drives , 212 mile on his Nissan .
course , with the holidays coming up , Best Buy and Costco would n’t let a duad dopes keep buying up all of the external in their stores , and they bulge ostracize them from from buy hard movement . Again , kind of like meth cookers . So they started ask friends and kinsperson to facilitate buy up drives , and coming up with other crazy ideas , like driving a rental motortruck around the land and buy K of private road at place without a leverage limit .
at long last , the tough drive shortage subsided , and 1900 bargain cellar hard drives later the company is doing just fine . It ’s a story carry with ingeniousness — unless you were trying to buy a 3 TB external hard drive last holiday season . Then this is the chronicle of the jerked meat who ruined your Christmas . [ BackblazeviaGigaOm ]
grueling Drives
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