Buyer Beware

I got to admit buyer beware was way more informative than I thought it would be, and I think the turning point was when Digital West emailed Andrew back about the failure rates of their products. On the other hand Seagate responded to us as well unlike Hitachi, but I found the process to get information off of Seagate’s website exhausting, and futile many times when I didn’t a model, or serial number.
I had no idea that external hard drives were so prone to problems. I think the most surprising thing we discover was how fragile they are. Every site I visited recommended that you by a case for the hard drive, because a drop is a great risk with these products. That being said it seems that if you are careful with the drives they should last quite a while. Our research said upwards of five years, and in that time something better will likely come out anyway.
Secondary research helped, but primary research is really where we made some hay. As mentioned above going to the manufacturers was a great place to find information about how to care for hard drives, warranties, and even how to shop smart. John Pura deserves thanks. The guy is a wiz with computers. A couple days after he helped with our project he fixed a frozen computer in the radio station - and he wasn’t even in the room. Guy shows up anyway to make sure we a cool - class act all the way. I was surprised how much information even Wal-Mart electronics employees had about the external hard drives. We didn’t use any in our report, but when I asked about failures, and quality. He got me a hard drive from Lexmark, which is cheap, and has worked well for the first two weeks at least. I gathered much of what I learned from him by observing him talk to another customer who actually knew less than me.
I found that customer feedback, and critique are of limited value. Some are accurate, but in many cases, especially on-line, there is a limited pool that is not statistically significant, sometimes one person that rates the product so low it is meaningless accompanied buy explanations that are for the most part useless. Therefore we didn’t base any of our findings off that information, other than student, and expert testimony.
The aspect our project that I thought was most helpful for consumers was the how to care for a hard drive section, because it even if you buy the best hard drive improper care such as not ejecting, or constantly using the hard drive can cause it to malfunction. It is also good advice to ask any questions you may have, because there is so much information, and variety regarding external hard drives.
One thing that I noticed with all the projects was that there were items such as flight costs (Air Canada cheaper in some cases) that I had disregarded as impossible. The one that shocked me the most was the rental scam project. If they haven’t done this on the I-Team they should a lot of people could be helped just by what was taught in class, great research too possibly finding where the “creep” lives. I also liked that they highlighted different ways the scams can unfold.
I was impressed by all the buyer beware projects. They were all entertaining, and all immediately useful. The timeline provided for it gave time for review, and even elimination of information such as that of the forums, which were replaced by the purchase of an external hard drive.