Re: [PLUG] do no evil

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 2:32 PM, Chris Grabowy <cgrabowy@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Bought in bulk hard drives probably don't cost more than $40/TB or so.
>
> Speaking of buying bulk hard drives…has anyone ever done this?  What number
> is considered to be bulk?  And how much of a saving is there?
>

Well, the guy I was talking to typically gets bids from all the big
vendors, and was ordering tens of thousands for a government project.
He couldn't really talk about what was being stored, so I guess we can
use our imaginations.

I doubt you're going to get the same rate if you're just buying 50 of
them.  They had arrangements where they could basically pick up the
phone and be assured of getting what they needed when they needed it,
and not have to worry about things like the Christmas shopping season
or whatever factory burned down.  The vendor probably also did deals
for other big companies doing similar sorts of things (though I
imagine that not many needed their specific services, or were allowed
to buy them).

Somebody else might know more.  I'm sure you can get a bulk rate
without having to buy tens of thousands of drives.  You probably would
need to be buying at least hundreds of them though.

I know at work we buy laptops/etc in large quantities and we get all
kinds of arrangements like having them pre-imaged with the corporate
image, not having to return defective drives under warranty (due to
data retention requirements), and I think we also get some on-site
vendor support of some kind.  I think the only thing my employer
really owns is handing out the laptops and getting them back as far as
provisioning goes.  When my laptop developed a hardware problem the
buy basically went into the back, handed me a loaner, and told me to
come back after he migrated my data over to a new one the next
morning.

-- 
Rich
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