I guess if you needed a lot of hard drives, this was a brilliant idea. The company got all the drives it needed and shoppers made $5 per hard drive.
Specifically, the company got people to buy Seagate 3TB Backup Plus external drives for $100 from Costco Online -- "not from a Costco Store; leave those for the local folks," the company said. People shipped them to Backblaze's alias, "H.D. Farmer."