Demand for Hard Drives Rises in Russia Amid Attacks on Yandex and Sber Data Centers

Demand for Hard Drives Rises in Russia Amid Attacks on Yandex and Sber Data CentersRussians have become more interested in buying hard drives for data storage following the attacks on Yandex and Sber data centers over the past week, according to data from internal seller systems at the Wildberries and Ozon marketplaces accessed by Verstka.

According to Ozon data, the number of orders for external hard drives rose sharply on October 11 and peaked two days later, when the product was purchased 3,577 times. That was more than 60% above the highest figure recorded during the month before the attacks began. Russians also began ordering external SSDs, data-storage enclosures, and internal hard drives more frequently.

The total value of Ozon orders (shown in the screenshot) also increased significantly for various products in the external-storage category. Over the past week, more than 102 million rubles’ worth of internal SSDs were purchased, 21% more than in the previous period. Users bought external hard drives, spending 81% more on them than during the previous week; spending on external SSDs rose by 135% and spending on network-attached storage by 159%.

Interest in storage media also rose noticeably on Wildberries. During the week from October 8 through 14, users searched for one-terabyte external hard drives 8,107 times, 37% more than during the preceding comparable period. A similar pattern was seen in searches for products with other storage capacities and those without a specified capacity.

Demand for flash drives also increased: after the strikes on the data centers, Russians began searching for them more frequently on both Wildberries and Ozon. On the former marketplace, interest in products with one terabyte of storage increased by more than a thousand, surpassing the threshold of nine thousand searches. Interest in flash drives with capacities ranging from 8 to 256 gigabytes also rose.

🟪The Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Region, was attacked overnight from October 7 to 8. After that, facilities in Kaluga and Vladimir were struck by Ukrainian drones. Drones struck Sber’s data center in the Rostov Region on October 14.

😘 Subscribe to @svobodnieslova and support Verstka — it matters