> Something that didn't make sense to me with the pricing, we looked at the cost
> relative to the capacity from one JTS drive to another, and as the drives go up in
> capacity, the value seemed to get lower. I'm showing my ignorance here, I'm sure,
> but shouldn't it be the other way around, the way it would be with food, for
> example, where buying in larger quantities gets you a better value?
Well, if the larger capacity were only achieved by adding platters or increasing platter area, then what you say would be true. You surely have noticed how disk drive prices at the low end always bunch up, presumably because you always need one motor, one enclosure, one circuit board and I think usually only one of thingies that position the heads...what are they called?... actuators? (I'm probably leaving a bunch of details out there, I'm in no way a disk drive engineer)
Current prices support this, the first gig will cost at least $100, the second another $50, the third an extra $30 or so. Your theory also holds when it comes to enlarged form factor (Nordic or Bigfoot).
The reason it doesn't always work this way, especially for newly introduced capacities, is that new read/write head technology needs to be introduced to achieve it. From what I understand, the heads are relatively expensive drive components, and like microprocessors, ones using new technology are often priced at a premium even though they may cost no more to produce, mainly because of supply and demand. (If you were a hard drive producer, and new heads with 2x capacity of the old ones were introduced, wouldn't you pay more than 2x more for these heads? After all, you get to remove a platter too, and you can only produce high end drives using these heads).
Of course it's also possible that Global does not price the drives strictly according to their cost, and likewise, their cost may not strictly reflect the price to manufacture.
--Scott |
