(Backblaze engineer here.) We have been told that until we buy blocks of 10,000 drives, we cannot deal directly with the drive manufacturers. We're not there yet, thus we NORMALLY bid out each drive purchase (about one large order per month) to four or five regular "resellers" and "distributors" like CDW, Ingram, B&H, etc and take the best price that month. We were down at $90 or so for individual Hitachi 3 TBytes at the low point before the crisis. We're currently paying around $160 from CDW and friends and we can afford that without raising our prices. During the Thailand flood crisis, CDW offered "not enough drives" (half our order) for $350 per drive. We said "no", because we couldn't afford "yes". :-)

Anybody can win our business by under bidding the other resellers, and we're ALWAYS open to suggestions. If you know any way to achieve lower drive prices, let us know! PLEASE!!