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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

Why are "external drives" available when there's a shortage of "internal" drives? The hard drives, as the article points out, are the same except in the external case a ... case is added.

It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Do harddrive manufacturers reserve a bunch of drives for the makers of external products (which, often, are branded by the drive makers themselves), which helps ensure that external drives continue to show up?

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During the peak prices after the flood, you could still get cheap(er) drives from companies that had long-term fixed-price contracts with the hard drive manufacturers. I'm guessing makers of external drives were one of those.

interestingly, while i was exploiting this same trick for 2.5" drives (for a mini-itx machine with raid), i came across one company that was using "native usb" drives - i opened up the casing to find that the internal drive had a usb port instead of sata! (iirc it was the ones in a nice, soft-touch black rubber case - WD i think?)

No idea but many customers exploited that. The Internet Archive bought a lot and then gave away the enclosures to eg Noisebridge. Google is utterly useless to find photos of it, I remember them being on flickr.

Possibly this?: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gardaud/6922621705/

(FWIW, I searched [flickr "internet archive" external hard drives] to find this)

Yeah! There were also photos of the truck and of their "who needs enclosures" post later.

I would assume every data centre in the land placed huge orders as soon as a shortage became a possibility. Most individuals on the other hand wouldn't have rushed out to Best Buy even if they were aware of the situation!

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