Speed or Capacity

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Blackstone

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Question--what do you think the general public is more interested in:

1) Hard drive capacity; or

2) Hard drive speed and performance (VelociRaptor).

Do you think it is possible to market a system to the general public (I might do some local building) with a 300GB VelociRaptor, or do you think having a 1TB drive is now considered a minimum feature?
 
The general public is dumb.
You can give them a POS drive and say its blazing fast and has ginormous capacity.
 
IMO the performance and price difference between the Velociraptor and many of the WD Black drives is barely justifiable for enthusiasts. So more storage would probably more interesting to the general public.
 
For the publc

Storage....the bigger the number the better right?

Just tell them that its fast, they dont know.
 
western digital's 640AALS is probly the drive of choice, atleast it is for me. it has good capacity and top of the line speed for a mechanical drive and at $75 you can easily afford to raid 0, 2 of them for the price of a raptor
 
General public:
1. Reliability
2. Price
3. Capacity
4. Speed

In that order.
 
Blackstone said:
Question--what do you think the general public is more interested in:

1) Hard drive capacity; or

2) Hard drive speed and performance (VelociRaptor).

Do you think it is possible to market a system to the general public (I might do some local building) with a 300GB VelociRaptor, or do you think having a 1TB drive is now considered a minimum feature?
Click to expand...

Generally speaking, anyone who would ask to have their computer built probably wouldn't notice the difference in speed of a faster mechanical drive over the extra capacity if the price stayed the same.

When I do a build I ask the customer 2 questions.
1. How much do you want to spend?
2. What do you want to do with it?

From that I lay out their options within that budget showing them where the money is going. Let the client decide if they need more speed or storage even if you have to "translate" it to the hardware. If you are worried divulging real prices, tack on %10 or whatever your cut is to the invoice to each part so it's reflective of their relative cost to each other.

Personally I tell them exactly how much it costs and how much I charge, I then tell them how long it would probably take them to build, not accounting for errors, troubleshooting, or configuration.

I learned in sales is let the customer take you where they want to go. Ask if they want more info, 9/10 won't if you just clarify the basics, but also 9/10 want to know you can tell them.

General public:
1. Reliability
2. Price
3. Capacity
4. Speed

In that order.
Click to expand...

/agree
and general public won't do more with the comp than MS office, youtube and email. Maybe a burned disc or two with an occasional video encode.

IMO the performance and price difference between the Velociraptor and many of the WD Black drives is barely justifiable for enthusiasts. So more storage would probably more interesting to the general public.
Click to expand...

Count me as one of them as I am just gonna skip ahead to SSD's. Wonder how hard the price of raptors is going to come down in response to them.
 
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Perhaps you will have better luck than us, but the computer shop I work at in Fishers IN doesn't even stock "enthusiast" parts anymore, we order them on an "as needed" basis. We opened in 2007, and had a bunch of 8800GTs, Core2Duo E6xx0 series chips, PC2-8500 DDR2, Asus Republic of Gamers motherboards, and other top flight hardware at the time. Six months later, it had lost half of its value. A year and a half later, we were compelled to simply write off a sizable portion of our initial opening inventory.

We're still sitting on a C2D E6300 that the system says is worth about $200. We've got a 2x1GB kit of Crucial Ballistix PC2-8500 that the system says is worth over $200. We have an Acer laptop from late 2007 - a C2D T5500, 1GB of RAM, 120GB, XP Pro, that we can't sell even at a $400 loss. We have a 600W enthusiast class PSU that's collected dust since we opened.

Now we only stock JEDEC reference RAM, high quality 350W PSUs, 7200RPM drives <=500GB, generic <$30 DVD drives, a handful of motherboards for <$75 and CPUs that retail for <$125. We have a demo laptop and netbook ... that's it. You will find very quickly that computer parts inventory is just an albatross, and one item hanging around for more than six months can wipe out your profit margins on ten of the same thing that you sold within a month of getting it.

If you're running your own shop, consider getting distributor channels. D&H, InfoTel, Ingram Micro, Synnex, Seneca Data and other distributors have fully stocked warehouses within one day ground shipping of the vast majority of the continental US - if you order something before noon, you get it the next business day with standard shipping in most cases.

85% of our parts sales:

DDR2-667 & PC-3200 DDR (Dell / HP / name your OEM upgrades)
7200RPM desktop & 5400RPM laptop HDDs (replacements of failures in Dell / HP / name your OEM)
350W Ultra Lifetime Series PSUs (Again, OEM replacements)
 
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