4 ms·

Right it is wasteful. The reason some businesses are so successful is that they look at the common denominators rather than trying to perpetuate worth. Fewer va

Right it is wasteful. The reason some businesses are so successful is that they look at the common denominators rather than trying to perpetuate worth. Fewer variants and don't wall off features. AMD did this for the longest period getting back on it feet, but I am seeing a failure of them continuing down this path. They need to stop making variants and focus on 3 or 4 sets of consumer processors.

PaulHoule 2y ago
Yep, “too many SKUs” killed off the consumer HDD a few years faster than it had to die. If these companies had focus groups that reached out to ordinary people they’d realize it sounds absolutely incredible to most people that you need one hard drive for a 3-5 bay NAS, another for a 6-9 bay NAS, another if you are recording from video cameras. Even if there was a real benefit from optimizing firmware and saving a few cents with cheap washers for drives in a low vibration environment there is a much more certain cost in that you have to qualify the firmware, risk introducing errors, etc. I can imagine that Best Buy might have been able to stock one model of high capacity HDD but no way were they going to stock more colors of WD drive than there are on the rainbow flag. That lack of product sense locked manufacturers out of the retail market. (Makes me think of the cringe monthly hard drive roundup in Anandtech where an enterprise drive produced in huge numbers in a single SKU would usually be $80-100 cheaper than prosumer drives that, according to the spec sheet, consumed about 0.5W less and were about 3db quieter… And I have plenty of those enterprise drives still spinning after all these years, the only time I think about the noise is when the machine boots and the drives emit a throaty chirp that makes me think of a Ferrari spooling up.)

4 ms·

Right it is wasteful. The reason some businesses are so successful is that they look at the common denominators rather than trying to perpetuate worth. Fewer va

by Sparkyte 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago
Yep, “too many SKUs” killed off the consumer HDD a few years faster than it had to die. If these companies had focus groups that reached out to ordinary people they’d realize it sounds absolutely incredible to most people that you need one hard drive for a 3-5 bay NAS, another for a 6-9 bay NAS, another if you are recording from video cameras. Even if there was a real benefit from optimizing firmware and saving a few cents with cheap washers for drives in a low vibration environment there is a much more certain cost in that you have to qualify the firmware, risk introducing errors, etc. I can imagine that Best Buy might have been able to stock one model of high capacity HDD but no way were they going to stock more colors of WD drive than there are on the rainbow flag. That lack of product sense locked manufacturers out of the retail market. (Makes me think of the cringe monthly hard drive roundup in Anandtech where an enterprise drive produced in huge numbers in a single SKU would usually be $80-100 cheaper than prosumer drives that, according to the spec sheet, consumed about 0.5W less and were about 3db quieter… And I have plenty of those enterprise drives still spinning after all these years, the only time I think about the noise is when the machine boots and the drives emit a throaty chirp that makes me think of a Ferrari spooling up.)