Sunday, October 01, 2006

My another trip to Pantip Plaza

Hard disk prices are cheap these days, and getting cheaper every month. Today I just bought 320 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm 16 MB cache SATA drives, 2 of them in fact, from Pantip Plaza in Bangok. I also bought an aluminium case to house both of them together, with 2 FireWire 800 ports, a FireWire 400 port, USB 2.0 port, cooling fan at the back, and all cables provided. The aluminium case looks well matched with the G5 tower.

Back at home, I checked for the price of the drive in the US from the Internet and found that the price I paid (~4200 Baht) was about or 10% higher than a price quoted on a web in the US ($95). That 's normal since we have to pay 7% tax (Thailand 's VAT). In addition, IT retailers in Bangkok have also generally said that, although Thailand 's import tax of this type of products is 0 percent, they still have under the table cost to pay anyway, not to mention their own profit margin.

I did not bother to check the price of the aluminium case, which has no brand. I bought it at about 6000 Baht. At first I was looking for a cheaper case, but that would not have FireWire 800 port which is twice the speed of FW400 or USB 2.0 Most Windows PC do not have FireWire 800 port, only the Mac computers do. With smaller number of Mac customers in Thailand, that 's why cases with FireWire 800 port are a lot more expensive.

Now I am all set since I have got external back up hard disks with 640 Gb capacity for my data. Since this unit needs external electricity, looks like I should use UPS for this stuff.

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