Is it me, or does it not seem like there are many decent black Friday deals on any kind of internal storage whether it be a spinning hard drive or a solid-state device? My last drive purchase was a 16 TB Toshiba enterprise and they paid $225. Black Friday deals. Don’t even come close to this.
Except, perhaps, if people are willing to shuck.
Internals and SSDs aren't as sexy as externals. "I have to open my computer and install it? I've never done that!" And unlike externals, which are a way for the manufacturers to make money off their 2nd tier stock, internals are a commodity.
Keep an eye on Cyber Monday as retailers have been saving some of their best deals for that day.
Different customer base. I get that. I've used a few externals over my life, but prefer an external case with bays for multiple drives instead of the single casified external.
That's $100 more than what I paid for it not that long ago. Get a price tracking app. I prefer Keepa, but CamelCamelCamel (aka the camelizer) should work well also.
Black friday in general is pretty lackluster lately, but keep in mind that you're looking for deals on items that don't really experience the seasonal variability that other consumer products do. People (generally, this sub aside lol) aren't putting HDDs under the christmas tree.
As a deal addict I can confirm that, generally, if you haven't found a deal on something by Thanksgiving, it's unlikely anything good will surface on BF or CM. Many vendors try to get the jump on BF buy starting their discounts in early November. BF is so called because it's a big profit day for sellers, while it's really Red Friday for buyers.
I missed the bus - Bestbuy had an 18 TB WD for $200...
However -
Amazon has the external Elements WDBWLG0180HBK (18 TB) on sale for $229 right now. (USA)
I think part of it is how product pricing has changed and economy of scale. Back around 1990-2010 tech companies didn't sell in as much volume so their margins on each unit had to be large. For example company X was making a TV for $500 and selling it for $700 but they were only selling 5,000 a year. Thus black Friday deals meant they could lower the price to $550 while still earning a profit.
As volume increased, competition forced them to low prices and focus on economy of scale. Now company X is making a TV for $500, selling it for $550, but they're selling 20,000 of them. They're making the same profit as they did before, but there's less room for sales. Now the same sale for total profit would look like $512.
To the company it's all the same. In both instances they were making 1,000,000 before the sale, and 250,000 during the sale; but to the consumer it went from around 28% off to a %6 off.
To the consumer sensibility it's bad since it seams like nothing goes on sale, but in actuality it's good because it's like everything is on sale all the time; we just don't notice. It's also why devices with low volume are so expensive.
I didn't see many deals, I did grab a couple 16tb's off serverpartsdeals.com in order to fill up the remaining 2 3.5" bays I have one server. That and a friend of who's giving up data hoarding sold me 7 slightly used 20tb wd essentials for a bargain, which I'm not going to even shuck those I'll keep them as offline backups.
black friday deals havent been that great in 20 years. it used to be a major deal.
This is bullshit.
Black Friday was insane for a handful of years following the Great Recession of 2008. Lasted till the very early 2010s. Retailers were desperate, desperate, to get you in the door or buying things on the website.
We have better price tracking tools now than we did 20+ years ago. There's plenty of websites that will tell me how good a sale price is without me having to skim through a bunch of old issues of Computer Shopper by hand.