Shipped from Hong Kong
This weekend I was contemplating how I could upgrade the hard drive in the Archos. It uses a standard IDE notebook hard drive (2.5"), so I was thinking it should be easy to come across a used 40-80 GB hard drive someplace. The instructions said the drive had to be formatted FAT32, which Windows XP and Vista won't do on hard drives that size, but older versions of Windows will. It was recommended to get an adapter to connect a 2.5" drive to a regular computer (3.5") and format it before swapping the old drive out, but I didn't have such an adapter and didn't want to anything for one since I would only use it once.
I went to eBay to look for used notebook hard drives and the search turned up these adapters. They were $1.32 with free shipping! I figured I couldn't afford *not* to buy one at that price (though later on I found them for 99 cents plus 6 cents shipping; so it always pays to keep looking). I don't see how they can afford to even send me something in the mail (it's pretty small though), and it is shipping all the way from Hong Kong.
Still haven't found a hard drive. I bid $23 plus $7 shipping for a used 60 GB hard drive, but the winning bid was $32.77 plus shipping. That's crazy! New 500 GB hard drives at Amazon are $90 with free shipping. They are SATA, though, and the Archos won't support that. Amazon may have some used hard drives for reasonable prices if I look hard enough.
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Comments (4)
I think I am starting to understand how they can make money selling items for $1.32. It has been 3 weeks and I still haven't gotten it. I sent them an e-mail today to ask what happened.
Posted by Ted | September 15, 2009 7:25 PM
re: "starting to understand".. meaning "they take your money and send you nothing?"
Posted by Jeb | September 16, 2009 4:58 PM
That seems to be the business model. They have a very high positive rating on 12,000 items sold since they joined in February. I still feel like I'll get it eventually.
Posted by Ted | September 16, 2009 8:09 PM
I decided that if I didn't get it by today, I was going to go ahead and give them a negative review and turn them in to eBay for not delivering. So sure enough, it showed up today. It was in a very small padded envelope (about 4"x5") with a Hong Kong postmark of 30 8 09. So it was almost a week before it was postmarked. But I tested it out in my old computer and it works as advertised, allowing me to hook up a notebook drive to the desktop drive cables.
Posted by Ted | September 18, 2009 11:37 AM