A Deal With The Devil

I think everyone is clear on my feelings about Best Buy by now. Yet, that's exactly where I was today, AND came out of the store carrying something more than a DVD or CD. Yes indeed; I did in fact buy a computer product from the enemy. Why would I consort with "that sort"? Well, Christmas happened, and we have this family gift tradition where you draw names and this years poor misguided family member knowing that I was the "techie" type decided that a gift card from Best Buy would be in order! After cursing my fate and kicking the cat (not really),then after 3 months of head-scratching, I just couldn't think of some way to magically make it be PayPal credit. So today with daughter in tow, there I was in the lair of the great satan trying desperately to find something ....anything, that wasn't ridiculously overpriced! I had that $25, as well as a rebate card for $10 from buying RAM some time ago. So, all-in-all, I had $35; meaning I could buy something like flash storage of some sort worth the amount, or apply it to something that was in fact priced decently. So why the dump truck of earth moving proportions? Remember my last post? I'm about to embark on a server rebuild.......ahhhh......."I see, said the blind man to his deaf daughter". I have a lot of data to move. In fact I've been looking at external drive enclosures and bare drives of 2Tb (or larger) to do this with AND then to function as backup to the server of the future.

.....And on the last aisle before car stereos, stashed among the legions of Western Digital and Seagate storage was a little display of Toshiba Canvio external drives marked with little "As Advertised" signs. On one shelf were 2 boxes of the the 2Tb versions at $99.95 which is really a pretty darned good price, but sadly, the shelf directly above marked for the 3Tb ones at $119.95 was empty! While I stood there silently cursing my fate and contemplating buying the 2Tb drive, I came across one of the brainless blue-shirted automatons (Best Buy employees to the uninitiated), so I asked if he could look up the store in a neighboring suburb to see if they still had some of the 3Tb ones in stock. Twenty-five minutes later, another of the automatons came back to point out that there were several more completely somewhere else instead of the marked display. I was too overjoyed to be annoyed by this little piece of "BB" stupidity, so happily paid $85 (after expending my cards) for 3Tb of storage in an unobtrusive enclosure sporting a USB 3.0 interface. If my math is right, that's less than $30 per terabyte, meaning every dollar I spent bought about 33 gigs of storage. Just typing that makes me a little giddy. 

Oh, but this gets better! Inside of this relatively unobtrusive little box resides....wait for it......a Hitachi hard disk drive!!! I know I said that it's a Toshiba "Canvio" (whatever the hell that is), but you see, it's a bit of a convoluted tale. You guys may be aware that my preferred mechanical storage maker is/was Hitachi. It used to be IBM who sold their drive division to Hitachi. For whatever reason, Western Digital Corporation (who I don't hate, but not my fave) bought out HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) last year.

However, due to some pressure from various regulatory organizations around the world who frown on monopolies, they had to divest themselves of one of Hitachi's Chinese factories which made drives of capacities up to 3Tb. Thus enters our friends from Toshiba.

Had this been an actual Toshiba product, I'd have never bought it. The last time I had any dealings with Toshiba hard drives was when they would randomly spit up the MBR about once a year. However, I knew the desktop Canvios (???) with that peculiar 5900 rpm (actually 5940) rotational speed was actually a restickered Hitachi with their "Coolspin technology".

I don't know all the convoluted machinations of this weird triangular agreement, but I do know that there are a bunch of "Toshiba" re-labled Hitachi's out there for sale at pretty low prices compared to other brands.

All I know is that I was able to get a competitively priced ($119 is the same as Newegg) product at Best Buy where $35 of that was essentially "written off". So I paid $85 for something which was exactly what I needed, I'd have probably even bought it if it was a Western Digital or a Seagate, but that it was a rebranded Hitachi was just icing on the cake. Oh, and almost forgot to mention that the new motherboard on the rebuilt server has USB 3.0, so yeah; a perfect match for this new drive.