Do you care what your hard drive looks like?
I don't.
But according to today's NY Times, the latest external hard drives are being marketed as eye candy.
Don't get me wrong, I swear by external hard drives. I've got so many of 'em connected to my laptop that I had to buy a USB hub just so I could use 'em all at once. I've got a big one for video, a portable one for work stuff, and another one for music. I've even got one that I can't use most of 'cause I pulled it from an old computer that died and the user files are password protected.
Only the SimpleTech 2.5" portable has anything approaching design, but I bought them all because they offered the most gigabytes per dollar. I might pay a little extra for a smaller size in a portable, but not for style, I don't think. And for a regular 3.5" external drive, style is completely irrelevant.
I understand that vendors want to get away from selling hard drives like commodities, but, uh, that's what they are.
Oh, and despite "price wars, component shortages, and competitive upheavals," drive shipments still grew 15% last year, according to research firm iSuppli, as quoted by Antone Gonsalves in InformationWeek.
Spoken like a true PC user. I do care what my desktop looks like, though it's not the deciding factor in choosing a hard drive. Having just been shopping for one, I got the chance to ask myself just how much more the looks are worth. The first one I bought looked cheesy, like an engineer's idea of what well-designed would look like, but was unbeatable for GB/$--it wasn't worth a 40% premium to get a nicer-looking model. But I would have gladly paid maybe 20% more for looks.
ReplyDeleteI had to return it anyway, and ended up getting one of those MyBooks, which was on sale, so the difference between that and the FW Porsche-designed LaCie wasn't worth it. If the Porsche was on sale too, I might have made a different choice. But I think one of the lessons is that none of them are that ugly anymore. We're not talking about a choice between an old-school slab of beige plastic and something with some style (if we were, heck yeah I'd pay something for style)--we're more choosing a style we like.