Sorry, not being English my comment was maybe not really clear. They do not buy on the grey market (they are the largest hosting provider in Europe, 120k+ servers) but they carefully select the drives to have only the ones with the best reliability because the cannot afford to simply swap the drives of the dedicated servers to often as they operate on a low margin approach. They are not cutting down on guarantee, these are dedicated servers with guaranteed hardware, they change the drives in case of failure at no cost.
If you operate on low margin, you better have systems with minimal needs of manual operations, because as soon as you have one guy pulling a dedicated server, changing the drive and putting another one, you have lost a couple of months of your earnings on this particular server. If you do that too often, you are not happy at the end.
If you operate on low margin, you better have systems with minimal needs of manual operations, because as soon as you have one guy pulling a dedicated server, changing the drive and putting another one, you have lost a couple of months of your earnings on this particular server. If you do that too often, you are not happy at the end.