They actually had people buying external hard drives for them last year[1], so they're probably just removing the drives from the housings and then recycling the casing.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. We make the decision to switch to the more dense drives when the "break even" point is about 1 year of operation. We have a little spread sheet (it isn't rocket science) of how much electricity a drive uses, what we are paying for the physical space rental, etc. We plug in the prices if the 4 TB drives pay for the overhead within 1 year we go ahead and buy those.
The drives seem to last about 5 years in our experience, so technically we should be able to buy the more dense drive it it pays back in 4 years, but cash to run the business is very dear to our hearts so we don't like going out much more than a year on a payback.
Yes, probably not same speed specs, but it's external, which means it usually costs more for the convenience of the housing.
Edit: Unless my math is wrong, the 3GB model is a better price point...$40 for a TB as opposed to $44+/TB for the 4TB version. http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Desktop-External-STCA30...