[wilhil]

I'm curious what is being used for the drives (and to a lesser extent, memory) - Dell or OEM and how does support work?

We sell a lot of Dell and for base models, it is very economical compared to self built.

The moment however we add a few high capacity hard drives or memory, all bets are off the table and it's usually 1.75-4x the price of a white box part.

I get not supporting the part itself, but, had them not support a raid card error (corrupt memory) after they saw we had a third party drive.... we only buy a handful of servers a month - I can imagine this possibly being a huge problem for Backblaze though...

[wfleming]

Backblaze has usually sourced their own hard drives, and I suspect they still are/will. (The post didn't seem to indicate otherwise.)

Every year they post a summary of what models they're working with and how they perform, which is usually good reading. This is last year's: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-fo....

[ineedasername]

The post didn't seem to indicate otherwise

That appeared to depend on whether the vendor imposed massive markups on the drives. However they also mentioned service etc.: If they struck a deal with Dell, then Dell might be perfectly happy to sell the servers at a very modest profit while making their money on the service agreement.

[ocdtrekkie]

Especially flash storage goes through the roof at enterprise purchasing. I've bought the drive trays and used consumer SSDs in servers more than a few times with no real ill effects where SATA is acceptable. If you need SAS, you just need to accept the pain that is about to come when you order.