They did but you had to buy them yourself and most of the times you didn't have a use for them after. With snowball they manage the process end to end.
What's interesting is that they don't mention this on the marketing page for snowball. As in "also if you want you can mail your own harddrive, see this page for details". While most would think "why rain on the parade of this new service by mentioning the old service" with Amazon it's more than that. It's this entire idea of weaning people off of legacy ways of doing things (with new names and new processes) so it's harder for any competitor to offer the same type of service, unique way of doing things or handholding. After all anyone can accept (in theory) a mailed in hard drive. Much harder to offer a solution like this with hardware and so on. So to me this is obviously deliberate and consistent with Amazon wanting to raise an entire generation on a new paradigm of getting things done.
Edit: And yes this way it's easier for them as well and removes "missing power supplies" (big deal actually by I get the point..)
There was also a lot of hassle in ensuring that you included the correct power adapter for each external drive, something that got complicated if you were shipping a lot of different models.
larrys|10 years ago
Edit: And yes this way it's easier for them as well and removes "missing power supplies" (big deal actually by I get the point..)
astrodust|10 years ago