HITACHI - Confusing Hard Drive Marketing?

[IIvII]

So here's something interesting. I saw Newegg has a 3Tb external hard drive on sale for $129.99. Whats truly odd about it - besides it being a great price for 3 Tb - is what's inside. The drive inside is model #HDS723030ALA640. That's a 64 Mb cache, 7200 RPM, SATA 3 drive! Newegg doesn't have that model to buy as an internal but Amazon does, and it's 40 bucks more!? Everywhere I look I can't find the internal anywhere near as low as I find the external. It seems most places are running the external for $129.99 but the internal is always up around that $170 range. Does anyone have any idea why they would market the external at such a lower cost? It's baffling to me.

I'm considering buying the thing and just ripping it out of that shitty usb 2.0 case, what do you folks think?

 

[tdg]

One difference is the warranty, the external has a 1 year warranty where the bare drive carries a 3, that probably factors into the price a little bit. Otherwise its probably just that the majority of people buy externals now as they don't want to upgrade their PC hard drive or they only have laptops where 3TB doesn't exist in internal drives, just simply the laws of supply and demand influencing the price. Buy the external and rip the drive out, save yourself some cash and enjoy a free external enclosure if you ever need one.

 

[Old Hippie]

Buy the external and rip the drive out, save yourself some cash and enjoy a free external enclosure if you ever need one.

This will void any warranty.

Most/many/all manfgs have caught on to the "remove the drive from the case trick" and many external drives are slightly different mechanically or use different serial numbers than their internal counterparts.

I purchased this Hitachi 3TB internal for 106.92 in July.

Deals can be had.