When last year’s hard drive shortage threatened Backblaze’s all-you-can-store cloud backup service, the company had to get creative to keep up its 50TB-a-day hard drive habit. The solution: external hard drives from retail stores and an army of volunteers making sure they kept coming.
“We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.”
Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year.
“Literally overnight,” Budman told me, “… all the places we would go to get drives said, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any drives.’”
