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I wonder why external drives are cheaper than internal drives. One would think that they would be more expensive, since the cost to the manufacturer of an exte

I wonder why external drives are cheaper than internal drives. One would think that they would be more expensive, since the cost to the manufacturer of an external drive includes not only the drive itself but the adapter contained in the enclosure, the enclosure itself, cables, possibly a power supply, more elaborate packaging and the additional labor required to assemble the external drive. I assume that this consumer cost differential arises from differences in the markets for internal and external drives, but naively it seems like the internal drive market would be more price-sensitive and thus lower margin. Does anyone know why external drives are typically cheaper than internal drives?

mangotree 13y ago
Maybe, with the advent of laptops becoming more popular than desktops, there is just a bigger market for them. Cost is usually due to demand constraints.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I doubt it. Server farms consume an unreal quantity of drives. Desktops consume 1 drive per person.
  - Retric 13y ago
    Server farms store data for actual people. So sit back and think about how much unique data you have on servers somewhere. Add it up and I dont't think the total data storage at all data centers everywhere in the US add up to more that 20GB per person in the US as we are just not that interesting even at 5x redundancy your still at 1/30th a drive per person. Don't forget at 300 million people that would still be 10 Million drives which is a lot of servers. PS: The NSA could be recording every phone call ever made and it's still not all that much actual data.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      The dropbox model is not the only place for server farms. How about render farms & their associated data stores. How about Google Maps & the associated scads of satellite imagery. You could be right, of course, but I'm not sure we can say with certainty.
      - Retric 13y ago
        Google Maps stores a 'tiny' amount of data per person. The surface area of the earth is a little less than 200million square miles or a little less than 2/3 of a square mile a person. at 1 foot accuracy that would only be two 10 megapixel pictures per person not that we actually have maps anywhere near that good of most small towns let alone the oceans or arctic. The only thing that really spit's out data is raw scientific data, but even Nasa just dumps well over 99% of what they collect so it's more of a short term problem.
bluedino 13y ago
They only have to QC them with the controller they ship with, instead of a hundred different PC's or motherboards. Not sure how much of a difference in cost that is.
sliverstorm 13y ago
I will throw in that, from my experience, external drives usually contain lower quality disks. This is fitting; external drives are primarily used for sequential access on a sporadic basis. E.g., backups, movies, archives
wayne_h 13y ago
I bet it has to do with the target market. 4tb external drives are something an end-user consumer would shop for based on price. While a 4tb bare internal is shopped for by techies building systems.
atYevP 13y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> Personally, I think that the biggest part of the is price sensitivity. External drives are geared towards consumers, who simply will not buy the drives if they go up too much in cost. The internal drives we were buying are targeted at business' who have a choice to make, either buy at the higher price, go out of business, or get creative. We try to go the go creative route because we really don't want to go out of business, and paying the higher prices for drives, especially in this case, would have gotten us there. Backblaze tries to avoid the "enterprise tax" as often as we can, and internal vs. external drives are just another example of how "enterprise-grade" items get marked up because the target market will pay for it.

mangotree 13y ago

Maybe, with the advent of laptops becoming more popular than desktops, there is just a bigger market for them. Cost is usually due to demand constraints.

sliverstorm 13y ago
I doubt it. Server farms consume an unreal quantity of drives. Desktops consume 1 drive per person.
- Retric 13y ago
  Server farms store data for actual people. So sit back and think about how much unique data you have on servers somewhere. Add it up and I dont't think the total data storage at all data centers everywhere in the US add up to more that 20GB per person in the US as we are just not that interesting even at 5x redundancy your still at 1/30th a drive per person. Don't forget at 300 million people that would still be 10 Million drives which is a lot of servers. PS: The NSA could be recording every phone call ever made and it's still not all that much actual data.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    The dropbox model is not the only place for server farms. How about render farms & their associated data stores. How about Google Maps & the associated scads of satellite imagery. You could be right, of course, but I'm not sure we can say with certainty.
    - Retric 13y ago
      Google Maps stores a 'tiny' amount of data per person. The surface area of the earth is a little less than 200million square miles or a little less than 2/3 of a square mile a person. at 1 foot accuracy that would only be two 10 megapixel pictures per person not that we actually have maps anywhere near that good of most small towns let alone the oceans or arctic. The only thing that really spit's out data is raw scientific data, but even Nasa just dumps well over 99% of what they collect so it's more of a short term problem.

bluedino 13y ago

They only have to QC them with the controller they ship with, instead of a hundred different PC's or motherboards. Not sure how much of a difference in cost that is.

sliverstorm 13y ago

I will throw in that, from my experience, external drives usually contain lower quality disks. This is fitting; external drives are primarily used for sequential access on a sporadic basis. E.g., backups, movies, archives

wayne_h 13y ago

I bet it has to do with the target market. 4tb external drives are something an end-user consumer would shop for based on price. While a 4tb bare internal is shopped for by techies building systems.

atYevP 13y ago

Yev from Backblaze here -> Personally, I think that the biggest part of the is price sensitivity. External drives are geared towards consumers, who simply will not buy the drives if they go up too much in cost. The internal drives we were buying are targeted at business' who have a choice to make, either buy at the higher price, go out of business, or get creative. We try to go the go creative route because we really don't want to go out of business, and paying the higher prices for drives, especially in this case, would have gotten us there. Backblaze tries to avoid the "enterprise tax" as often as we can, and internal vs. external drives are just another example of how "enterprise-grade" items get marked up because the target market will pay for it.