Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year.

Gleb Budman

“Literally overnight,” Budman told me, “… all the places we would go to get drives said, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any drives.’”

People assumed it was just a blip, and while Backblaze watched cautiously in the beginning, it figured it had enough hard drives stockpiled to make it through. However, when months passed and the situation only got worse — some suppliers were offering 3TB drives that used to cost $129 for around $600 — Backblaze knew it had to act. If the company didn’t want to change its pricing model or throttle users’ capacity, something had to give.

“That’s an absolute, just last, last, last resort,” Budman said.

It’s good to be a startup

Sometimes, it’s nice to have the flexibility of a startup. Rather than jack up prices or lower its revenue guidance, Backblaze just kept going about its business. Well, publicly, at least — behind the scenes, the company was working like crazy farming hard drives from the only places it could still get them at a reasonable price.

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. Keep in mind, adding 50TB a day means getting your hands on at least 14 new drives per day. In the end, Budman tells me, its ingenuity meant Backblaze was able to procure about 1,800 3TB hard drives — or about 5.5 petabytes worth of capacity — in the three months it was actively farming them.

Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army.

A chart of local stores and employee purchases

What doesn’t kill you …

Budman said the shortage should have taught everyone a valuable lesson that hard drives aren’t commodities that will always be available at commodity prices, so you need to take advantage of low prices when you can. In fact, Budman said, one of the reasons he resisted venture capital initially was to help stave off the mindset that money from VCs is easy and companies don’t need to spend wisely.

It appears the strategy worked. Backblaze closed a $5 million funding round in July 2012, but it hasn’t abandoned its hard-drive-farming ways. Internal hard drive prices have stabilized, but even today if prices on external drives drop to less than those of internal drives (after factoring in the voided warranty and the cost to shuck them), Backblaze will snatch them up.

But it’s nothing like the glory days in late 2011 and early 2012. Here’s a video of Backblaze employee friend and NextPunch founder Vladik Rikhter telling his story of playing cat-and-mouse with Costco’s e-commerce system and ending up with “a Kia’s worth of drives” in his entryway.

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The product in question is the Echo Thunderbolt to ExpressCard/34 adapter from Sonnet, which allows you to plug in ExpressCard/34 accessories and then use them via your Mac’s Thunderbolt port. ExpressCard/34 is a connection standard that’s only available built-in on 17-inch MacBook Pros, and allows you to plug in various adapters, like USB or FireWire hubs, memory card readers, modems, eSATA and USB 3.0 port add-ons.

So far, we’ve yet to see too many Thunderbolt accessories go into production, or at least ones that cost less than $1,000. There’s the Pegasus RAID array available through the Apple online store, which is admittedly a good deal for that kind of hardware, but it’s a little pricey for ordinary users. And Apple also recently introduced Thunderbolt Cinema Displays, but that’s also something that might appeal more to professional customers.

With the Echo ExpressCard/34 adapter, anyone will be able to use drives that support USB 3.0 or SATA high-speed transfer technology with their Macs, as well as add FireWire, Ethernet or memory card reader ports to computers that don’t have them, like the MacBook Air. The adapter will admittedly be a bit bulky, and its $150 cost is just the starting point, since you’ll have to buy the appropriate ExpressCard/34 adapter as well as any drives or accessories you want to use with your Mac, but it still puts things in a much more affordable range than the current crop of available Thunderbolt-powered add-ons.

The Echo is available for pre-order, and ships in October. It’s definitely one way to make your computer’s Thunderbolt more useful, but would you rather wait until more direct solutions appear? Let us know in the comments.

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Specs and stats

The Mac mini I’m reviewing here is the $799 model, which comes with 4 GB of RAM, a 500 GB hard drive, a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and a dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6630M graphics card with 256 MB of RAM. Connection options include 4 USB 2.0 ports, FireWire 800, a Thunderbolt connector, HDMI, Ethernet, digital/analog line in and line out ports and an SDXC card slot. It also has 802.11n Wi-Fi networking, and the new low-power Bluetooth 4.0 specification.

The new Core i5 series processor pushes a lot of weight compared to previous generations. Running it through Geekbench revealed scores of 6902 on average in my tests, compared to 3627 for the Mac mini released in 2010 (higher is better). Geekbench measures the maximum theoretical performance, but those higher scores should translate to noticeable speed improvements in overall performance.

While all the new Mac minis are much better at CPU-intensive tasks, the $799 model should really excel when it comes to graphics. Thanks to the dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6630M card, which marks the first time the Mac mini has had a dedicated card (maybe made possibly by dropping the optical disk), tasks like video editing and gaming go more smoothly on this mini than on any before it.

Performance

For me, the new Mac mini is replacing a much older model (2007, the first Intel Core 2 Duo version) that acted as the nerve center of my home theater setup. Compared to that machine, the new Mac mini offers many advantages: The larger stock 500 GB drive means I can depend less on external storage; HDMI out provides a single cable connection option that doesn’t require any adapters when used with an HDTV; SDXC support means I should have no problem viewing home movies or vacation slideshows from the cameras of visitors; and Thunderbolt promises to eventually make it possible to use huge, fast external storage media libraries a possibility, thanks to devices like the Pegasus RAID array.

On the other hand, the new Mac mini does away with the built-in optical disc drive, so users looking to play back their DVD movies either have to pony up an additional $79 for the MacBook Air SuperDrive, or set about converting their existing media library. Personally, the DVD drive removal is a welcome change; I long ago abandoned physical media for the convenience and reduced clutter of digital purchases and rentals. But if you have an extensive DVD movie collection you aren’t eager to part with, look at Apple’s deals on previous-generation refurbished Macs for a media center PC that will better suit your needs.

If you’re looking to use the new Mac mini as a workstation or traditional PC, this update has a lot to recommend it. I found that — like the MacBook Air I reviewed last week — it deals well with the load caused by using multiple open apps simultaneously, including demanding apps like Photoshop CS5 and iMovie. What it doesn’t do as well as the MacBook Air is load apps quite as fast, or handle shutdown and startup with the same lightning speed. That’s due mostly to the spinning disk drive which the Mac ships with by default, but Apple does offer a (fairly expensive) SSD customization option.

There’s one area where the new Mac mini has quite a bit of unique niche appeal: it’s road-readiness. With just a couple of input devices and the Mac mini itself, which has just a power cord with no heavy and unsightly brick, it actually gives Mac notebooks a run for their money in terms of physical footprint. Frequent travellers could easily pack one for use with the HDTVs now common in most business hotel rooms. And if they want a device that’s a desktop at home and offers more screen real estate than a laptop on the road, it’s quite a bit cheaper than a MacBook.

Verdict

Apple’s newest Mac mini is the best yet, thanks to a lower price tag and processor updates that deliver big CPU performance boosts with even lower power consumption. If you’re looking for a fairly future-proof home theater PC, or a low-cost, moderately powered workstation that can follow you wherever you need to go, this is the Mac for you.

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Kaminario sells the K2 appliance, which delivers faster access to more information via a blade-based DRAM array. The DRAM array has cost advantages over Flash-based solid-state drives, which puts Kaminario in a slightly different category than the other SSD folks who are generally using Flash memory. However it’s still banking on similar trends of enterprises needing faster access to more data. Kaminario launched last June about the same time as Anobit, another storage vendor that is offering a cheaper variation of SSDs (Anobit shares Pintango as an investor).

Joining their ranks are Violin Memory, Pliant and Fusion-io, which filed in March for an initial public offering. At the time I said, and still believe, that it would much rather get bought. So, with all these startups trying to sell some version of better, faster, cheaper SSDs into the enterprise, who’s likely to pick up the technology? Obvious buyers would be Intel, which is a huge vendor of SSDs, any of the memory giants Samsung, SanDisk, Seagate or Western Digital, or perhaps even a computing vendor such as Dell Hewlett Packard or IBM if the server becomes just another component in the data center.

Because Violin and Kaminario both sell storage appliances they may be a better fit for storage vendors who get a complete product line, whereas Pliant and Fusion-io are more in the component space and may be a better product for storage or server vendors. Anobit, because it offers a way to boost the performance of a cheaper type of Flash memory could be a good fit with an actual memory maker such as Samsung or Intel.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons contributor Greg L. Wright.

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However, turning external drives into a modular, platform-independent component is more than just a nice way to sell some extra cables: Company representatives told me today that they eventually envision DVR and set-top box makers supporting the interface in order to give consumers the ability to easily add storage without worrying about plugs and formats.

The first device that makes use of this is actually produced by Seagate itself: The GoFlex TV HD media player, which will ship by the end of the month and allow users to watch local content from a connected hard drive as well as access Netflix, YouTube and locally shared content.  This device is competing with a number of existing products already on the market, but Seagate has thought about a few nifty ways to appeal to sneakernet video lovers.

The GoFlex TV comes with two USB ports for legacy storage as well as Flip cameras or anything else you might use to capture or store video. It also uses Seagate’s new GoFlex interface, which is essentially just a SATA port packaged into a nice enclosure bay. Users that also own a GoFlex drive would shove it into the front-loading slot to access the media stored on the drive.

The device supports a number of different video codecs and container formats including DivX HD and .MKV. Got an ISO of a DVD ripped to your hard drive? No problem, GoFlex TV will not only play the image, but actually allow you to utilize the DVD menu — something that should appeal to the file sharing crowd as well as people who love to back up their own DVD collection.

GoFlex TV also features Netflix as well as a few other media apps, and I was told today by Seagate that they’re thinking about providing an SDK to third-party developers to add their own apps in the future. The device can play local as well as remotely hosted 1080p content, and offers HDMI as well as composite outputs.

The idea of offering similar bay options for GoFlex drives to other companies is pretty interesting. Essentially, this could be a way to offer a new standard that could be used by companies like Boxee or Roku to ship cheap boxes and leave it up to the consumer to add third-party drives. SATA is an open standard, and Seagate representatives told me that they’re going to offer any further licenses needed to accommodate the drives for free.

GoFlex drives are available immediately, and the GoFlex TV will be available later this month.

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