The dark side of Fry’s and HD upgrade headaches
I picked up a Hitachi/IBM 180GB drive for $69.99 this weekend at Fry’s Electronics. It was essentially $179.99 with a $90 and $20 rebate. The evil thing about Fry’s ridiculous deals is that most of the rebates expire that same day! No one ever mentions it to you and it only says so in the small text of your receipt. Of course, any smart consumer always double checks their receipts before they leave the store but I’m pretty sure a whole bunch of people who purchased the drive thinking they got a sweet deal didn’t end up sending out the rebate and will get a rude awakening when they realize it’s too late. Of course, one could simply return the drive (assuming they haven’t cut up the box for the UPC label). Anyways, I rushed home filled everything out and dropped off the mail at the post office.
Now that I have this nice new drive, I decided to stick it in my external Firewire/USB2 enclosure which currently only has 80GB in it. To my dismay, the enclosure only sees 128GB which means the current firmware doesn’t support larger than 137GB drives. Ugh! So, now I’m trying to figure out a way to update the firmware. I’m constantly amazed at how a lot of systems and enclosures don’t support the super large drive sizes even though the drives have been out for a long time. I think it’s part of a major conspiracy by manufacturers to constantly try to get you to upgrade.
