Why is that external drives are often cheaper than internal?
Disk Prices on Amazon
31–40 of 224 posts
Re: Disk Prices on Amazon
#32We stopped buying drives from Amazon when we got drives for "the wrong region" and couldn't RMA them.
NewEgg is a bit better, but don't buy refurbished drives. Provantage is another reputable vendor that usually has decent prices.
If you're local to the SF bay area, check out Central Computers. King Star USA also works if you're a business customer making a large purchase.
Re: Disk Prices on Amazon
#33This seems all Amazon links only (with affiliate codes). Given their known counterfeit problems and fake reviews, I would recommend avoiding it for important things like disk drives. Plus, they are not guaranteed to be the cheapest anyway. If you need to buy a drive, I would recommend local brick and mortar store first, and some sort of proper aggregator (which looks at multiple sites, not just Amazon) second.
Have you ever tried to buy tech at a B&M store? They will have obsolete products that have been on the shelves for years listed at the original MSRP. I'm sure there are exceptions but this is generally terrible advice.
Those applies for only shitty B&Ms.
In Asia there are a lot of serious vendor. Sometimes B&M prices and stock availability here is very competitive with online offering.
B&M is still good for me when I can't wait for shipping or risk postal damage. It's also convenient to have a face I can look at whenever I would like to dispute something FAST. Especially disk storage products.
Re: Disk Prices on Amazon
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree about the local stores part, but yeah for specific areas like electronics I always go for a more trustworthy site (like NewEgg, Jet or sometimes Best Buy). Prices are usually the same as Amazon, and if not they will almost always price match.
IDK, I suspect newegg reviews are equally gamed. Fundamentally, I think we need to come to terms with the fact that product reviews are worth the price the consumer paid for them: typically zero.
At least there’s no counterfeit products.
Re: Disk Prices on Amazon
#35Why is that external drives are often cheaper than internal?
I have thought about this as well. I would love someone more knowledgable to chime in - but if I had to guess it is that consumer hard drive sales have been declining a lot in recent years. Desktops are a thing of the past for your average PC user, and as a result hardware/storage upgrades. Laptops, mobile devices, and cloud storage is where it's at. No one is buying hard drives anymore except large enterprises. In order to appeal to the consumer market HDD manufacturers need a value prop to compete with cloud storage. So discounting bulk storage is the play. I am guessing that they are selling "white label" enclosed drives at a lower margin than the enterprise counterparts but still netting more in the long run.
Re: Disk Prices on Amazon
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes you can also run into situations where someone returned an external hard drive, but they swapped the drive inside with a cheap low capacity drive (like a 500gb drive put into an 8tb drive enclosure)
That's not a particularly scary scenario when buying from, e.g., Amazon.com, as it'd seem like the unit could just be returned for not being the advertised product. I'm curious, though, why would anyone bother with a scam like that? I mean, it'd seem like someone with the necessary technical skills could make a larger, steadier income through honest means. So why would they waste their time/effort on something that c…
This was done a bit with microsd cards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-D6tYBX8vE
Re: Disk Prices on Amazon
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever tried to buy tech at a B&M store? They will have obsolete products that have been on the shelves for years listed at the original MSRP. I'm sure there are exceptions but this is generally terrible advice.
BestBuy will price match Amazon. So getting the real deal sounds better.
You local Best Buy will also probably have 5 hard disks total. The chances of getting exactly what you want (looking at the list in the linked site) is minimal.
Re: Disk Prices on Amazon
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree about the local stores part, but yeah for specific areas like electronics I always go for a more trustworthy site (like NewEgg, Jet or sometimes Best Buy). Prices are usually the same as Amazon, and if not they will almost always price match.
IDK, I suspect newegg reviews are equally gamed. Fundamentally, I think we need to come to terms with the fact that product reviews are worth the price the consumer paid for them: typically zero.
For electronics at least I can't remember the last time user reviews drove my purchase. I always look at specs/benchmarks, reviews on tech sites etc., and then go to the vendor with a fair idea of what I want.
Re: Disk Prices on Amazon
#39Wow, SSD prices bounced back after December. I think most people were (and still are) expecting $100/TB to be the new baseline.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B078DPCY3T?context=searc...
Re: Disk Prices on Amazon
#40This seems all Amazon links only (with affiliate codes). Given their known counterfeit problems and fake reviews, I would recommend avoiding it for important things like disk drives. Plus, they are not guaranteed to be the cheapest anyway. If you need to buy a drive, I would recommend local brick and mortar store first, and some sort of proper aggregator (which looks at multiple sites, not just Amazon) second.
Have you ever tried to buy tech at a B&M store? They will have obsolete products that have been on the shelves for years listed at the original MSRP. I'm sure there are exceptions but this is generally terrible advice.
If possible, Micro Center or Frys. Frys is somehow profitable but with dwindling stock at every California/Nevada location I’ve been to recently (maybe an indicator of higher prices?), but Micro Center is great.