On 05/04/2011 02:31 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:

> Welcome to the 21th century!
> Were the price is not fixed by how much it costs to produce, but how
> much the target is ready and expecting to pay.

Well, the price of cotton has been determined that way for millennia. 
Then again, you can more or less tell what you're getting as soon as you 
see it...

> In this wonderful time, selling a set of identical items with different
> price is just an opening.
>
> A 2TB hard drive at 25$ : it must be crap.
> At 100$ : it's cheap and ok.
> At 130$ : it is a bit of margin for the seller.
> At 200$ : it must be real good.
> At 500$ : it's only for the pro.
>
> It's also a sad time: the expected time life of any product is about the
> one provided by the law. (and that might be short!)

I know people like HP and IBM like to charge 10x for the same harddrive. 
But they *claim* that it's because the device is engineered for greater 
fault-tolerance. (E.g., take a 2TB drive, reconfigure the firmware so it 
shows up as 1TB, but up to 50% of the sectors can go bad before it stops 
working.)

I have absolutely no idea whether these "server-grade" drives really 
*are* more reliable, or whether it's just a sucker tax.

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