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.

CTO, unless that's changed....

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.

For example, Google's Map Reduce paper has a section on fault tolerance that goes into detail about how they handle the issue of failing workers:

http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html

This could be minimal and something that in terms of budgetary considerations might be negligible - but I'm not sure.

I think the calculation is replacing one drive takes about 15 minutes of work. If we have 30,000 drives and 2 percent fail, it takes 150 hours to replace those. In other words, one employee for one month of 8 hour days. Getting the failure rate down to 1 percent means you save 2 weeks of employee salary - maybe $5,000 total? The 30,000 drives costs you $4 million, so who cares about $5k here or there?

Is that really the true cost of replacement? I would think there is also the cost of dealing with the warranty and the testing and monitoring. Here is the quote from the blog post about unsuitable drives:

> When one drive goes bad, it takes a lot of work to get the RAID back on-line if the whole RAID is made up of unreliable drives. It’s just not worth the trouble.

I don't have the time to think about this fully, but it seems similar to calculating the present value of a future cash flow, because there are other costs beyond the first replacement effort:

> Their average age shows 0.8 years, but since these are warranty replacements, we believe that they are refurbished drives that were returned by other customers and erased, so they already had some usage when we got them.

It sounds like the total cost of a failed drive is actually 1.5x, because 50% of the replacement drives also fail.

EDIT: comments from BB employees below actually say they often buy off the shelf from NewEgg and Amazon.