Early on, we (I work at Backblaze) were told by the large drive manufacturers that to do a "direct order" we had to buy at least 10,000 drives in a single order.
If those are 12 TByte Seagates, that's about 120 PBytes? So at this point we are almost there and in fact we sometimes talk directly with the manufacturers, who turn around and send our order through a distributor or reseller. This is probably to prevent "channel conflict" where Seagate or Western Digital is undercutting it's distributors, but that's just a guess.
If those are 12 TByte Seagates, that's about 120 PBytes? So at this point we are almost there and in fact we sometimes talk directly with the manufacturers, who turn around and send our order through a distributor or reseller. This is probably to prevent "channel conflict" where Seagate or Western Digital is undercutting it's distributors, but that's just a guess.