[brianwski]

> What might shed light without revealing too much is information about where they source drives today

Backblaze employee here -> we are willing to buy from anybody, we have no loyalty. Lowest price (for a particular drive model) always wins. Once per month we ask about 20 common suppliers for their "best price". We have bought from "B&H Photo Video", NewEgg, Amazon, etc among others. We're always willing to add more possible vendors, but I think we drop you from the list if the vendor bid prices don't even come close for 3 months - that means you don't understand anything and you're wasting our time.

[freshyill]

With the volume you must buy in, why not buy direct from the manufacturers? I imagine they could supply you with their OEM pricing and product packaging, which seems like it would save money? Or is it a strategic reason like not getting stuck with one manufacturer?

[grecy]

I asked that question last time BB employees were here on HN.. the answer was they just don't buy enough volume to qualify to buy direct from the manufacturers. It sounds like you must but enormous quantities before the manufacturers will give you the time.

[atYevP]

Unfortunately that's still the case (Yev here, from Backblaze). Minimum orders are around 10,000 unites, and we're just not there yet. Thinking about starting a consortium though, so if anyone needs hard drives... ;-)

[StuckInTexas]

That is absolutely untrue. Talk to the big distributors, they will also be able to fix your incredibly unstable supply chain.

[atYevP]

We currently work with Distributors. I was referring to the manufacturers themselves, like buying directly from Seagate/WD. We currently work with a few different distributors to get different types of drives.

[scholia]

"Backblaze employee here"

CTO, unless that's changed....

[brianwski]

Guilty as charged. :-) CTO, head janitor, the company lived in my 1 bedroom apartment's living room for 3 years and up to the first 9 employees.

[atYevP]

He's so modest.

[hga]

BTW, I'm not sure B&H Photo Video deserves scare quotes.

If you've been doing video and/or photo stuff for a long time, you know them as a rock solid distributor: I've been buying video stuff from them since the middle '90s or so, camera stuff more recently (e.g. my first serious camera, vs. Amazon they had better selection with competitive pricing). Joel Spolsky was sufficiently impressed with this home town operation to do a fascinating write-up on them: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090501/why-circuit-city-failed...

One other note on who to buy from: if you're just buying one or a few drives, Newegg has gotten really serious about packing. http://www.pregis.us/en-us/productsandservices/productsoluti... inflated padding inside a fitting cardboard box. I suspect this is about as good as the packaging Seagate requires to return a drive for warranty service. Don't know about B&H, but as of a couple of years ago Amazon had a horrible reputation for packing bare hard drives.

[mzs]

Ever run into counterfeit drives?

[atYevP]

Not that we're aware of no. We doubt it would pass our testing if it wasn't legit.