Fun Shopping - Geek Style

Yesterday I gave a coworker a USB flash drive from my stash, so I thought I might have to replenish the departmental supply. I looked at what I had spare in my office and I have four Kingston DataTraveler drives, one 1GB model, two 2GB models and one 16GB which I use for moving bigger stuff. Then it was time to go to our CDWG web store to check out the current prices on Kingston DataTraveler drives (for which we get a pretty hefty discount). I thought I would write up a table comparing today's prices and also the price per gigabyte since I love analyzing numbers. Here is a little table with my calculated costs:

CapacityPricePrice/GB
2GB$6.06$3.03
4GB$8.36$2.09
8GB$15.32$1.91
16GB$30.07$1.88
32GB$62.37$1.95
64GB$155.92$2.44
128GB$384.24$3.00
256GB$779.62$3.05

The first interesting thing I noticed is that it is hardly worth buying 2GB flash drives anymore since for only $2.30 more you can get a 4GB drive. That was timely since the only drives I now have to give out to folks here are a 1GB or 2GB model, drives I would not even buy these days (I am not giving out my 16GB drive!) The price per GB is 50% higher on a 2GB than on the cheapest drives, but is consistently about $2/GB from 4GB to 32GB drives. The sweet spot is currently at 16GB with a $1.88/GB price, but that still requires $30 for the drive. In most cases, people really do not need a 16GB drive for hauling around PowerPoint presentations and PDF files and even their music collections or a movie or two. For most people, a $8 4GB drive or at most a $15 8GB drive is really all they need. I was surprised to see that I could purchase a 128GB or 256GB drive now, although their prices (and their price per GB) are selling at quite a premium. For the same price as a 128GB flash drive you can buy a netbook with a 160GB spinning hard drive, and for the price of a 256GB flash drive you can buy a really nice notebook with a 320GB or 500GB hard drive.

For fun I thought I would compare the NewEgg prices to our university discounted CDWG prices. It shows some interesting results:

CapacityPrice4+ Price
2GB$7.99$7.49
4GB$9.99$8.99
8GB$17.99$15.99
16GB$30.99$27.99
32GB$59.99NA
64GB$150.99NA
128GB$344.99NA
256GB$722.99NA

On the cheaper 2GB to 8GB drives CDWG gives us a better price especially since we get free shipping on everything as part of our university discount. Our discounted prices even beat the volume prices from NewEgg until you get to the 16GB model. However, once you move to the 32GB and higher drives, the prices are better with NewEgg, and they even sell those drives with Free Shipping. The obvious reason is volume where CDWG probably ships hundreds or thousands of 4GB and 8GB drives every day to large organizations like Washington University, whereas NewEgg probably ships more in smaller orders. Large organizations probably do not order large volumes of the larger more pricey drives, so NewEgg can compete there much more easily. Now that we order most items directly with a procurement credit card it does not really matter what vendor we use, but I still probably still order more from CDWG than from NewEgg, most likely due to our nice academic discounts and free shipping on everything. In reality, NewEgg's website is ten times better for searching for particulars, but once I identify what I want on NewEgg.com, I can usually find them with a model number on CDWG's site to make the actual purchase.

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