What is Backblaze's nasty strategy to survive the crisis of HDD price spikes caused by floods?

Backblaze, a cloud storage service provider, is known for regularly publishing failure rates for its hard drives and solid-state drives . Despite the impact of the global hard drive shortage caused by the 2011 Thailand floods , Backblaze managed to maintain its prices without raising them. The full details of this nasty strategy for dealing with the HDD shortage were explained in a 2012 blog post.

Farming Hard Drives: How Backblaze Weathered the Thailand Drive Crisis
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/

The 2011 floods in Thailand had widespread and long-lasting effects, including flooding at a factory of Western Digital, a major storage manufacturer, forcing production to halt. This led to a shortage of hard disk drives and a surge in prices around the world, including in Japan.

HDD sales prices soar across the board due to the impact of the Thai floods, with repercussions on the year-end sales season - GIGAZINE

At the time, Backblaze's systems were primarily built on hard drives, with over 50TB of hard drives being added daily. However, the floods in Thailand caused the price of hard drives to rise several times. After discussing countermeasures, employees gathered to find solutions. They discovered that 3TB external hard drives were being sold at major retailers Costco and Best Buy for $100 (approximately 10,500 yen) less than internal hard drives. They decided to split up and go buy external hard drives. Below is a commemorative photo of the purchase of 52 3TB external hard drives at Costco.

Backblaze used a storage pod built with commercially available HDDs and motherboards, rather than corporate HDDs. For this reason, they were able to carry out the strategy of 'purchasing an external HDD sold at Costco or Best Buy, disassembling it, removing the HDD, and installing it in a storage pod.'

However, as the HDD shortage continued, retailers like Costco began limiting HDD purchases to two per customer in mid-November 2011. Backblaze estimated that five people would visit three stores per day and purchase 210 drives in one week. While the estimate fell short due to some stores being out of stock, they continued to visit retailers without giving up. The following is a snapshot of one day's drive to buy HDDs after work. They circled San Francisco Bay, visiting 10 Costcos and Best Buys, and successfully purchased 46 HDDs. The total distance traveled was approximately 340 km.

As a result of their continued purchase of large quantities of hard drives, Backblaze employees were banned from Costco in late November 2011. They asked their relatives and friends to help them buy hard drives for them. Thanks to these efforts, Backblaze was able to weather the crisis without raising prices.