[conspire] external storage recommendation

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> BTW, CentralComputers does not have any flash drives in stock. They do
> havelarger form factor drives, but those seem to feature Seagate or
> WDproprietary software.Thanks everyone for getting me refocused.

Central Computer has traditionally been quite thin on carrying
inventory, but then, notoriously this has been true of brick-and-mortar
stores generally, as a predictable response to competition from the Big
South American River and other online vendors.

Of course, what they tell you if you say you want something not in stock
is "we can special-order it for you", which, yeah, but then you start
wondering what you need the store for.

I fully sympathise with their (and other retailers') need to not finance
inventory to the extent possible.  But this dynamic means you have to be 
alert for (1) the "we don't have what you want, but trust us, you'd be
better off with this other thing we happen to have in stock" trick, and
(2) the "this is actually an OEM unit and lacks a manufacturer warranty"
trick.

Central Computer has a posted sign in the store, in relatively small
type but (in fairness) readable, that puts customers on notice that many
items offered have "store warranty" only, not manufacturer warranty.

Silicon Valley old-timers will recall the cautionary tale about "store
warranty only" embodied by unlamented but once-popular retailer NCA
Computer Products in Sunnyvale -- which suddenly and catastrophically
collapsed one day in 1997:
http://www.sysgu.com/Pages/BackupYrBackup.html
(Note bonus cautionary tale about backups, at the link.)

NCA Computer Products was famous/notorious for unbelievably low priced
on hard disks and similar gear, with hidden reasons why the prices were
so low:  Some of what they sold were questionable "seconds" and returns 
with high early failure rates.  A _great_ deal of it was OEM gear --
which means components earmarked as private sales to OEMs for use only
as integrated into their gear -- say, HDs bought in bulk for use in
assembly lines for their own branded computers -- with the explicit
understanding that the customer, and not the component manufacturer,
would provide any/all end-user support and warranty service.

So, you would hear (or be) a cautionary tale, where you bought a 4.3GB
Maxtor SCSI drive at NCA for a world-beating price, take it home, try to
add it to your SCSI chain, and find that it didn't work unless you
disabled "SCSI disconnect", which ruins performance by disallowing
concurrent access to multiple devices on the SCSI chain.  

You can Maxtor customer service for an RMA authorisation under warranty,
cite the S/N, the agent looks it up, and you're surprised to hear "Sir,
you'll have to call Tandem Computer for warranty service on this drive,
as the S/N indicates that this is an OEM component."  Backstory was:
Maxtor made a big batch of drives with a mild defect that made SCSI
disconnect not work, and Tandem Computer spoke up and said 'Ooh, if
you'll give us an 80% discount, we'll buy the entire batch, as we 
want to use them on single-HD systems."  Maxtor agrees because 20% 
is better than total write-off, and Tandem gets cheap drives.  Later,
Tandem has excess inventory, so sells them in bulk, still for cheap, to
NCA.  Which then roped in gullible customers.

So, long story with a short lesson:  With "store warranty only" on
a product, know what you're signing up for.  It means you get only the 
return/exchange/service the store is able and willing to provide.


> I like the bicycle analogy. I know from my own experience that a $1000
> bike is much better than a $200 bike. And a $4000 bike is even better.
> But if you don’t do much bike riding you won’t get the benefit of
> the more expensive models.

Er, I apologise if this comes across as me indulging a hobbyhorse, but
that is a misreading of Moen's Law of Bicycles that has been _so_ common 
over the years that I actually tried to refute it in the Web text.

The point of my law is actually that the effect I mention operates 
at _all_ price points.  When knowledgeable buyers predominate in 
any market including economical ones, average quality for that specific 
price point goes up.  When ignorant, clueless buyers predominate,
average quality for that specific price point goes down -- because it's
cheaper to make shlock, and such products will drive out better
offerings and make them unavailable or specialty offerings, because the
better products' value proposition will go most-often unnoticed.

If I'd _merely_ said "More money can get you a better bicycle", that
would IMO have been banal and not worth the pixels spent.  But that is
absolutely not what I said.