Cheaper winnies on an NCR tower

[H. L. Rogers]

In article <201 at pigs.UUCP> haugj at pigs.UUCP (Joe Bob Willie) writes:
>
>NCR is not a drive manufacturer.  To claim to conduct more testing that
>Maxtor or Miniscribe or NEC or Fuji is pure marketing hype.

Not true Joe.  Some vendors *do* conduct more testing on parts which
they purchase than the manufacturer themselves.  I don't claim this
is the case with disk drives, but NCR certainly throws a full suite
of tests at a disk drive on three different levels:  pieces-parts of 
the drive, the whole drive itself, and a system-level test in the NCR
TOWER.  We verify *every* piece of data specified by the manufacturer,
including soft/hard error rates, MTBF, operating temperature/humidity/
vibration, electrical interfaces, electromagnetic emissions/suscep-
tability, etc., and then some.  We then verify the drive can
be broken down in a customer site and repaired with replacement *parts*.
Of course, if an HDA goes, we don't bother with replacing just that.
The point is, we *do* conduct probably *as much testing* as the drive
vendor.  Although I do not know for sure, I suspect the more successful
computer companies do the same.  I know for certain the 3 largest
companies conduct such testing.

In article <32743 at pyramid.pyramid.com> csg at pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes:
>
>  In the case of NCR, they *do* perform more rigorous drive tests than the
>  drive manufacturers do themselves.
>
>- Vendors are in the business of making money (obviously), so they will charge
>  the highest price they can and remain competitive. Systems vendors generally
>  do not consider themselves as competing with drive vendors, since they know
>  (correctly) that the majority of their customers are not capable of instal-
>  ling a disk drive. So they set prices not on what the drive vendors charge,
>  but on what other systems vendors charge.

Even OEM customers who resell the NCR TOWER buy disk drives from NCR
(at least the first one in each machine).  Several customers than add
second drives themselves (we helped them do it).  Other customers
prefer buying second, third, fourth, etc. drives from NCR as well,
even though they have their *own* service organization.  We must be
doing something right!  Yeah, there will always be some customers who
are capable of adding their own widgets and complain about the high
prices of the widgets.  And there will always be those few who jump
on the bandwagon and cry foul without knowing anything that went into
setting the price of that widget.  Do you buy a stripped-down 
automobile and then add radio, ac, power this-and-that, etc. yourself?
Or a cheap VCR and then add extra heads for better quality?
No, you buy a *brand name* you are comfortable with because you
know it will give you good service and be reliable for a long time.
And because it is more convenient for you to have someone else do
the work for the extras, the options, the add-ons, even though you 
know how.  And you pay a higher price every time you do that.  And
it does not matter if you are talking about NCR, General Motors, RCA,
or XYZ, Inc.  It's the same everyway.  You get what you pay for.  

If prices are too high for a particular part, it is not the problem of
a particular company, unless a monopoly exists *by design*.  But
that's another subject entirely.
-- 
HL Rogers    (hl.rogers at ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM)