We had this problem at rsync.net ... the price of our main consumable tripling overnight, etc.
We really never considered "shucking" external drives, since the drives inside these enclosures are the worst spec'd, highest failure rate drives ... never mind the (usually) nonsensical enterprise vs. non-enterprise, they're just crummy drives.
Good for BB for making it work ...
BTW, hard drive price weirdness continues to this day - 3TB Hitachi enterprise drives two months ago were $198 (or so) and last week they were $248 (or so).
But Blackblaze's infrastructure is properly designed to tolerate hw failures. They use RAID6 and replicate your data to 2 or 3 different storage pods. Smarter than beint forced to buy "better" expensive drives IMHO when your primary business expense is raw storage.
We really never considered "shucking" external drives, since the drives inside these enclosures are the worst spec'd, highest failure rate drives ... never mind the (usually) nonsensical enterprise vs. non-enterprise, they're just crummy drives.
Good for BB for making it work ...
BTW, hard drive price weirdness continues to this day - 3TB Hitachi enterprise drives two months ago were $198 (or so) and last week they were $248 (or so).