Not just the Bay Area either. They coined the phrase "hard drive shucking", 'cause they were buying consumer external usb drives, then digging the drive out and thorwing away the enclosures.
That story is linked down near the end of the article:
Yev from Backblaze here -> Not ALL the hard drives, but yes. In fact we explicit told anyone that was out buying hard drives for us to leave some on the shelves for the average consumers going in to the stores, hopefully they listened.
