Voiding a warranty on an external hard drive

After a recent hard drive failure, I realized I need to start doing some proper backups (Duh, right?)  Anyway, while shopping for hard drives to build a backup NAS (for which I need some internal drives, not external USB drives) I discovered a trend where a lot of external hard drives are cheaper than internal drives at the same capacity. How does this make sense?

I ended up purchasing these 3TB hard drives for about $140 each at Office Depot.  It’s a crap shoot on which hard drive will be inside, but it will normally be made by the same manufacturer, and be of that capacity. (You would be surprised to find out this isn’t _always_ the case).

Being a 3TB Seagate, a quick search over at Newegg shows this drive which sells for $229.  That’s a $90 dollar difference.  WOW!  So doing this instead of buying internal drives is a bargain so far.

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Useful wireless solution comparison chart

Last week I was having a discussion with one of our members about solutions on how we can control his biped robot he is working on.  I was trying to explain that we could go something like zigbee (which he has a zigbee servo controller already) but you’re going to trade off throughput, if you wanted to add streaming video to it, and we’ll need to construct something for the pc to talk to the zigbee network.  We could go bluetooth, or even wifi, etc.  And it became a discussion of push pull’s difficulty implementing it, writing code for, cost of parts, etc.

(Biped robot pictured below if you havent’ seen it, it’s really awesome!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, I stumbled on this article on digikey’s web site that goes into further detail, but I wanted to share this nice little chart they have in the article.  It really sums up cost vs range vs throughput vs robustness.  I found it useful, thought someone else might also.  Enjoy.