Four Reasons Why MS should go Bigger

[Game_boy]

TheBigFatJ said:

gebx said:

#1 Cheaper - "Interestingly, a quick price search shows that 250 GB drives are currently cheaper than 120 GB drives."

Does the author of that article really think MS goes on pricegrabber every year and order 10 million hard drives? Seriously...

Microsoft makes a contract with a large hard drive manufactuerer to buy millions of drives at a time. Millions. They don't pay the price normal people pay, and they don't have to worry about discontinued product. The manufacturer will make drives *just for* MS if they're buying millions at a time.

And smaller drives, in thoses cases, can still be cheaper. There may not be any price difference among designs that have the same number of platters (say, 20GB and 60GB drives), but there will be a price difference between the multi-platter drives and the single platter drives. Not only is there a price difference, but there is also a heat difference and a failure rate difference.

It might make sense for MS to switch to flash-based drives for the Premium, since it's only 20GB, but it would possibly make the Elite less attractive since the Premium would have a faster drive then.

Absolutely. The price Microsoft pays will be proportional to the manufacturing costs, as the economies of scale that cause 250GB to be apparently cheaper than 120GB don't have much of an effect when you make orders on Microsoft's scale.