"How to add 5.5 petabytes and get banned from Costco during a hard drive crisis"

Gigaom:

one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year.

...

Its solution was to eschew the internal hard drives generally put inside servers and buy up the external hard drives sold for consumer backup at stores such as Best Buy, Fry’s and Costco. They fit nicely into Backblaze’s storage pods once removed from their protective enclosures, and the best part was that the 3TB drives Backblaze requires only cost around $169 apiece even during the height of the shortage. The company that builds Backblaze’s pods was even willing to “shuck” the drives for a couple bucks apiece, saving Backblaze a lot of manual labor in order to make its newfound source of capacity production-ready.

And then it happened: The shopping carts Backblaze was initially filling up gave way to two-hard-drives-per-person limits, which meant the company had to scramble.