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... ;-)
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.