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Comment by synack | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a thing to pull the prices of all the hard drives on Amazon every 12 hours and sort them by price per GB. https://diskprices.com/

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I'm still wondering why external drives are cheaper than internal ones.

It seems silly that if I wanted to buy an 8TB drive for my desktop I should buy an external and toss the enclosure.

My only guess is market pressure because of higher demand. Possibly externals drives are pulled from older stock? Does anyone have another explanation?

Brian from Backblaze here. I don't have any more info than you have, but some of us assume it is a form of the "IT Tax". Basically anything for "businesses" or "datacenters" the sellers charge (unreasonably) more than if it is a product for "consumers". Only a tiny number of consumers ever buy a 20 pack of internal hard drives. Thus they are given the "business tax" pricing increase.

The cost of a USB enclosure is about $2. So if the IT markup is larger than $2 the USB enclosure version, you'll see the same internal drive wrapped in a USB enclosure for less. Stupid? Yes.

People who shuck on /r/homelab often find totally different models when buying a few from the same place. It lets drive manufacturers stick any drive they want in the enclosure as long as it's the advertised capacity and RPM.

"My only guess is market pressure because of higher demand."

That's exactly right. In the mass consumer market (ie. people buying hard drives at retailers), a lot more external drives are sold than internal drives. Larger market → more competition → lower prices. On the other hand, for companies buying directly from manufacturers or from distributors, I would bet an internal drive sells for (a bit) less than the comparable external drive. Though I have never seen a price sheet. Would love to hear confirmation from someone in the industry.

Be careful about what drives you do this with - I've seen reports of some of these drives not having standard SATA headers once they're shucked.

Are you referring to the 2.5" HDDs with native USB connectors? I've never come across an external 3.5" HDD like that.

Externals also often only have 1 yr warranties vs 2, 3, or 5 for bare drives in my experience.

Just a guess, but, one factor could be a shorter warranty?

Plus some external drive customers immediately shuck the device and receive zero warranty.

Just a heads up, when I filtered on just SSDs, the top of the list was a BarraCuda HDD (ST3000DM008). It seems to have been incorrectly placed under SSDs on Amazon.

Bookmarked your site though, thanks.

What's the risk of getting counterfeits, or getting used drives sold as new?

Now that NewEgg's also into the 3rd party re-seller shenanigans, I've been getting my hardware from BB or Fry's more often.

Zemo's right: "And the Avengers [Amazon / NewEgg]? They went home. I knew I couldn't kill them. More powerful men [Walmart] than me have tried. But if I could get them to kill each other [3rd party re-sellers]..."

I presume you get affiliate revenue too. Does that cover your hosting fees? Your site is hard disk drives redux, could you apply the same recipe for a comparison site to anything else with a numeric bang per buck quantifier, to then profit?

I suspect there are few such categories but you could put together an interesting store that way if the affiliate marketing paid its way.

> could you apply the same recipe for a comparison site to anything else with a numeric bang per buck quantifier

Absolutely. I've done this with flashlights, for example.

I turn a small profit on the affiliate revenue, yes.

looks like the one thats the cheapest on your site @ $0.022 (Seagate Expansion 8TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STEB8000100) ) is actually on sale and works out to $0.0186 right now. I may jump on that quickly....

Yeah, the Prime Day promotion isn't exposed through their API so I can't account for that easily.

figures. that's a damn good deal though; too bad its limited to 1 per customer.

Just in case you weren't aware, when I view your website on my Windows 10 PC or Android smartphone all of the prices have an 'Â' preceding the £.

Screenshot: https://vgy.me/f9rd4b.png

The page doesn't seem to be declaring an encoding - on my computer set to Japanese the browser is assuming Shift-JIS and making a mess of everything

This is super handy!

To anyone using it, always click through and see what the product is. Right now it says the cheapest per GB internal drive is this one[0].

Turns out it's actually just the external inclosure. It doesn't actually come with storage.

[0]: https://www.amazon.ca/StarTech-com-10Gbps-Enclosure-SATA-Dri...

Odd, some appear to be missing. The cheapest 10 TB on that list is $417. I can get a Seagate IronWolf for $341 on Amazon[1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST...

I made one for scan.co.uk: https://hur.st/scandisk/

This is good work! I might reference your project in an article I've been writing about responsible affiliate sites.

I hope that's not the sort of thing that gets you banned from Amazon forever. That would be kind of harsh.

As my understanding of the terms of service goes, it's allowed as long as I don't compare the prices to other sites.

It's not an abuse of the API because prices are not being compared against products on other stores. However he is abusing their affiliate policy by not including an associates program disclaimer on the page.

There's a disclaimer at the bottom.

It's not disclosing that you make use of affiliates. Read section 5 of the associates program agreement.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreemen...

You can fix the encoding problem on your site with:

   <meta charset="UTF-8">

Nice! Is this open source? I'd love to contribute to this.

How did you select those disks? Did you just hard code a list of ASINs to query through their API or is this done by scraping Amazon front-end?

Amazon's product categories are identified as BrowseNodes, each has a unique ID. I found the IDs of all the relevant BrowseNodes, then use the API to query what products are available in each BrowseNode. I then use a ridiculous list of regexes to parse the product names to figure out the capacity and drive type, as Amazon's tags for those fields are really unreliable.

I only ask because the HDD list in particular seemed to be quite short. The last time I did this, I scraped the internal hard drive category (from the front-end) and filtered everything out that was smaller than 4TB and still ended up with at least 200 drives.

For tags, are you using the "Size" or the <ns2:HardDiskSize Units="TB">4.0</ns2:HardDiskSize> tag?

I did a few test queries and found those specific tags to be pretty reliable.

If you're open to it, we can discuss it outside of HN to see if there's a better way.

disclaimer: I do not have any vested interest in Amazon affiliate programs, I work with their API for my day job and always looking to learn.

*edit: are you using the advertising api or the mws product api?

Nice work! The German version unfortunately isn't able to display Euro signs properly "â‚¬0.250" is what I see with Chrome.

Great site, I can see I'll be using it alot!

What would be really nice is if you could add in a m2 ssd drive type.

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