i like that lol that was awesome.
wouldn’t entirely disagree… i don’t know the saving on them and the real issue is that it’s already distributed all across the globe… so difficult to compete with…
and then why would they want to sell stuff at a discount if they can sell them in shops.
lots of reasons why it might not be viable, which is why i think the used market is a much more promising field, because i know how volatile that market can be… one day you can be buying drives at 20% of new cost and another day you are paying 50-60%
at 20% … sure it’s rare but it happens especially if one starts to buy large scale…
i know people seem to hate used drives, but i duno really… aside from not having warranty, it doesn’t really seem so bad, so long as the bad ones gets sorted out.
ofc there is work involved with this kind of stuff, but it might be worth while…
Might, i cannot tell you that this is economically viable, nor can i tell you that it isn’t…
i know there are a fair amount of stores selling old datacenter hardware… and they seem to be doing quite well for themselves.
my best guess on if it’s viable with new drives… most likely not… maybe if one could get the manufacturer to send the drives directly to each of the SNO’s that buy them… then maybe lol…
but most likely highly unrealistic… but who knows… it might just be a few ideas away from working… or completely a waste of time…
pretty sure used isn’t… else i wouldn’t have suggested it.
I tried buying used drives but I’d only buy WD Red or similar and those are partly even more expensive than shucked white label WD Ultrastars (which are new!). So not a cheaper option for me… (in my country…)
I’ll revive the thread, as I found an interesting quote in a random reddit post:
I asked a BackBlaze employee who’s a member here if it was true that they get their enterprise drives at a lower price than externals. He said yes, but only after they agreed to buy 10K+ drives a month.
Note that this is a comment three times removed from the actual person being asked, but the answer matches my intuition on the HDD market. Joint purchases at a Storj scale just don’t seem practical yet.
Does Backblaze even buy 120k drives annully? From their reports they barely bought tens of thousands on a yearly basis… Maybe this was a one-time purchase?
its not impossible that they get the offer of discounts and an account for buying hdd’s as needed if ordering a bulk deal for initial expansion.
remember the hdd’s brokers will be use to dealing with new and expanding datacenters and will be geared towards making the best possible money on them… while the data centers will ofc try to opposite.
just thinking out loud…
a large deal for setup, makes sure people means business, makes sure the broker making their money’s worth always before starting doing regular business, and if the project fails they are on the winning side rather than the loosing side.
because the big deal is done first.
would actually be a pretty clever practice imo, without really deeply understanding that industry.
