Capitalism doesn't guarantee that things are priced in order of production costs. In particular, after these goods were produced, the ongoing inventory situation for hard drives had a wrench thrown into the works. One would hope the market then allocated a once-commodity component efficiently, such that users with the highest need for hard drives received them and users with less need made the decision to purchase hard drives later. For social (non-market) reasons, some people who sold hard drives decided to essentially sell hard drives below their market value, with rationing, to a) maintain availability of supply for a market segment with a relatively low need for hard drives while b) avoiding selling those hard drives into a market segment with a relatively high need for hard drives.
Economics (not quite capitalism) says that if you attempt to replace a market with a rationing system, you will get a market anyhow, because markets are emergent features of reality and as soon as you have multiple agents with differing values for the same goods trade happens. (Capitalism would add "... and that's a good thing!") Rationing will generally result in there being an artificial consumer surplus created in the system versus a functioning market, and that consumer surplus will generally be captured by a market-maker rather than either any of the intended beneficiaries of the rationing scheme or the entity who has the product requiring rationing in the first place.
In the absence of a rationing scheme, a) Backblaze would have had as many drives as it wished to purchase at the market price (slightly lower than the price they think is unconscionable in their normal channels) and b) most home users of hard drives would have been unable to source new hard drives at rates they were willing to pay, and would have turned to substitutes like "use refurbished hard drives", "decrease consumption of hard drive space", and "defer hard drive purchases."
Economics (not quite capitalism) says that if you attempt to replace a market with a rationing system, you will get a market anyhow, because markets are emergent features of reality and as soon as you have multiple agents with differing values for the same goods trade happens. (Capitalism would add "... and that's a good thing!") Rationing will generally result in there being an artificial consumer surplus created in the system versus a functioning market, and that consumer surplus will generally be captured by a market-maker rather than either any of the intended beneficiaries of the rationing scheme or the entity who has the product requiring rationing in the first place.
In the absence of a rationing scheme, a) Backblaze would have had as many drives as it wished to purchase at the market price (slightly lower than the price they think is unconscionable in their normal channels) and b) most home users of hard drives would have been unable to source new hard drives at rates they were willing to pay, and would have turned to substitutes like "use refurbished hard drives", "decrease consumption of hard drive space", and "defer hard drive purchases."