It's been more than a year since torrential rain and floods in Thailand started impacting hard drive factories in the country, but this week one cloud backup service is finally sharing its story about surviving the drought that followed.
The Backblaze Blog has filed a fascinating look at how the company was able to weather the recent hard drive shortage blamed on extreme rain and floods at the factories in Thailand.
Backlaze is a cloud-based online backup service that consumes more than 50TB worth of new hard drives every single day -- and as you can imagine, when the price of internal hard drives shot through the roof late last year, the company was immediately impacted.
After discovering that the cost of a 3TB internal hard drive had tripled overnight from $129 to $349 as a result of the crisis in Thailand, Backblaze had to get creative and find another way. The solution was what they internally referred to as "drive farming."
Backblaze employees headed to nearby Costco and Best Buy stores in the San Francisco area, where 3TB external hard drives were still selling for $169. Buying up all they could get their hands on (as you can see from the trunk full of boxes above), the drives then had to be "shucked" in order to remove the bare internal drive from its case, where it was then deployed in one of the company's storage pods.
By mid-November of last year, retailers began imposing a "two drives per customer" limit, which forced Backblaze employees to begin enlisting friends and family members as they got more and more creative in an effort to keep their customers' storage needs fulfilled.
The entire story is well worth a read, especially now that the hard drive shortages have long since vanished and prices have stabilized. We'd love to know how many reward points they racked up buying retail, though!
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(Image courtesy of Backblaze)
