Vendor disk price gouging?

[pete]

Looking around, the most expensive blingtastic "enterprise" 750GB SATA2 hard drives I can get (with 5 yrs warranty and 32MB cache) are about £126 ex VAT.

So why is the manufacturer (who uses the same model drives, with a firmware change that adds "Not an official $manufacturer disk" whining to the event log) charging £240/disk? The caddies will cost £15 ( based on HP caddy costs, cabling maybe £10.

That's an £89/disk markup, on top of whatever the vendor I used for price comparison is making. I'm looking at 8 disks - so an extra £712 via the manufacturer, plus the cost of spares (normally buy 1 spare disk per server).

I hardly think 89/disk is necessary for a) profit or b) covering up-front purchasing of sufficient disks to fulfill the part requirements for support contracts.

NB: bog-standard fileserver in my case, not a SAN.

[DMcCoy]

I suggest you don't look at apple or dells RAM prices.

I saved £300 by fitting 4GB to my imac myself

[pete]

I think I've already moaned about Ram pricing somewhere on here

[localzuk]

I always go for vendor hard disks, as the entire system is covered by the same warranty then. So if I go for a 4 hour call out warranty, this covers all the component bits too. Plus it is less hassle than having to deal with various suppliers. Just simply post a call to HP and boom, you have your warranty being dealt with.