The going rate for a 3TB external drive at Costco or Best Buy was $169. Internal drives, like those inside your computer and the ones we typically use in our storage pods, were at least $100 more and were becoming nearly impossible to find, having been bought by HP, Apple and Dell for their systems. Our “choice” to use external drives meant they had to be “shucked” – a process where the internal drive is removed from its case – before being deployed into a Backblaze storage pod. In addition to the price of the drive there were now extra costs to shuck the drives, extra costs to recycle the shucked parts, and once shucked we couldn’t return a bad drive, but it was still less expensive than buying internal drives even if we could find them. Problem solved, Costco here we come.
