Devil's advocate: Individual users probably aren't filling a 3tb hard drive most of the time. (This may not apply to HN users, but I imagine most people buy a hard drive larger than they need and never fill it up.) So arguably, Backblaze used the drives more efficiently, because each drive benefited many users and its entire capacity would be used.

I don't think it is immoral to purchase products from retail stores.

doesn't Backblaze largely do backups? as in their customer's already have the files on their own large drives and they need to back those files up, as in maybe you're reading too much into this?

I think a lot of the larger form-factor/larger capacity models are still shuckable, though sometimes you still have to put kapton tape on one of the pins to allow it to work with a normal machine.

Former backblaze customer here, the trick is that you can't copy and paste your password as one might do with a password manager. You have to type it manually so that the web page can interactively tell you how strong the password is getting as you type it.

Backblaze lost me as a customer due to the new password and 2FA requirements, which would lock me out if I were to lose my devices, the exact scenario I'm trying to mitigate. Not affiliated, I'm now trying my luck with pixeldrain, mega, and koofr (having quit proton lately as well since it broke rclone compatibility a few weeks ago).

Backblaze is a cloud storage company

The reason they're farming hard drives is so they can add them to their cloud storage network. You realize that cloud storage isn't actually in clouds, right? Hard drives are always local somewhere, and in Backblaze's case that 'somewhere' is a data center.