Farming Hard Drives: How Backblaze Weathered the Thailand Drive Crisis
Key Takeaways
- The 2011 Thailand floods severely damaged hard drive manufacturing capacity, causing prices for 3TB drives to nearly triple overnight.
- Backblaze faced a critical shortage of hard drives essential for its unlimited online backup service.
- The company launched an emergency internal initiative called "drive farming" to manually source drives without raising customer prices.
- Employees were deployed to purchase external 3TB drives from retailers like Costco and Best Buy, which were cheaper than scarce internal drives.
- The purchased external drives had to be manually "shucked" to extract the internal components for use in Backblaze's Storage Pods.
The 2011 Thailand floods caused catastrophic damage to factories responsible for nearly half the world's hard drive production, leading to an immediate and dramatic spike in drive costs for companies like Backblaze. As an online backup provider filling 50TB of new drives daily, Backblaze faced a crisis where the cost of core 3TB drives jumped over 200% in a matter of days. To maintain its commitment to unlimited storage without increasing customer prices, the company initiated an internal effort dubbed "drive farming" starting in November 2011. This involved employees and volunteers physically visiting retailers, primarily Costco and Best Buy in the San Francisco Bay Area, to buy any available 3TB external drives. Because internal drives were nearly impossible to source, the strategy required "shucking" the external enclosures to retrieve the usable internal disks, adding extra labor and recycling costs to the operation. Despite the human tragedy in Thailand and the economic shockwave, this grassroots sourcing effort allowed Backblaze to secure enough inventory to sustain operations temporarily.
