Print

[Devedander]

QUOTE(frieko @ Sep 18 2008, 10:31 AM)

Guys, according to your logic it should cost $10 to make a brand new '69 Mustang. Cuz it's so old and obsolete and you have 100 of them sitting around in your garage.

There's a fundamental lower bound on the cost of making a hard drive of ANY capacity.

Put in an order for 2.5 million 69 mustangs.  Someone will fab them for you and at a great rate too.

A better analogy is clock radios.  Super old tech, every DOES have a bunch of them lying around, and they are super cheap still.  Old and dated and newer tech to replace them widely available, but still dirt cheap.

Old tech doesn't become expensive because it's old, it becomes expensive because demand drops, with that cost to create goes up (due to lost discount from volume) and cost to supply goes up because the suppliers are likely to have to house the item longer since less people are buying it.

In the case of the hard 10 GB hard drives, if MS was ordering a boat load of them the price would not go up nearly as much.

But that's not even the point... Remember the original Xbox HD? They were 8GB.

Near the end they turned into 10GB drives with 2 GB disabled.

What does that tell you?  That they were not limited to 8GB drives... they could easily have slapped whatever the low price drive of the day was in there and been good to go.  This is proven by people who stuck larger drives in their boxes and still used them as normal with the mod chip turned off.

So even if 10GB were $60 there was SOME drive that was dirt cheap at the time.  By the end they could have been slapping in 80GB drives for $20 each and disabling 72GB of it.

No... the $70 drive price doesn't hold water.

[freyyr890]

QUOTE(Devedander @ Sep 18 2008, 04:58 PM)

Put in an order for 2.5 million 69 mustangs.  Someone will fab them for you and at a great rate too.

A better analogy is clock radios.  Super old tech, every DOES have a bunch of them lying around, and they are super cheap still.  Old and dated and newer tech to replace them widely available, but still dirt cheap.

Old tech doesn't become expensive because it's old, it becomes expensive because demand drops, with that cost to create goes up (due to lost discount from volume) and cost to supply goes up because the suppliers are likely to have to house the item longer since less people are buying it.

In the case of the hard 10 GB hard drives, if MS was ordering a boat load of them the price would not go up nearly as much.

But that's not even the point... Remember the original Xbox HD? They were 8GB.

Near the end they turned into 10GB drives with 2 GB disabled.

What does that tell you?  That they were not limited to 8GB drives... they could easily have slapped whatever the low price drive of the day was in there and been good to go.  This is proven by people who stuck larger drives in their boxes and still used them as normal with the mod chip turned off.

So even if 10GB were $60 there was SOME drive that was dirt cheap at the time.  By the end they could have been slapping in 80GB drives for $20 each and disabling 72GB of it.

No... the $70 drive price doesn't hold water.

My thoughts exactly.

I finally got around to upgrading my hard drive on Sunday, a 7200 RPM 500 gig Western Digital Caviar for $150.  It's working just fine so far (actually better because of the faster read speed).  Absolutely no reason why Microsoft couldn't have picked up some cheap surplus drives.

Just buy outdated surplus drives from Western Digital/Seagate/Maxtor for cheap (I'd think they'd be having trouble even giving them away), partition 8 gigs of space, and sell.

[johnnyrico]

It just doesn't make sense why they specifically wanted 10 and 20gig drives.
the Xbox1's PSU had no problems accomodating a 7200RPM drive,
nor does the cooling have any problem accomodating a 7200RPM drive.
heck, if you use a good brand they're as cool as the 5400RPM's they actually shipped in the old box.
and the Xbox dashboard has no issues running on a 7200RPM nor drives larger than 10 gigs.
so they could have just bought the drive manufacturers their end-of-life surplus of drives at dumping prices instead of having them specifically make 10gig or 20gig drives.
with bulk orders they cold have further reduced the price.
so honestly, the hard drive excuse is very poor.