geof@aurora.com (Geoffrey H. Cooper) (03/17/90)
In article <5157@itivax.iti.org> scs@iti.org (Steve Simmons) writes: >David Clapp (clapp@chip.UUCP) reports their purchasing department bought >some "from one of the classic distributors - Hamilton/Avnet or Arrow or >somebody. That was months ago for about $2600." We bought some SCSI disk drives direct from from Arrow a few months ago. Generally, the price was good, delivery was quick; they certainly delivered the quality of service that was promised, and I would not discourage someone technically qualified from going that route. However, having done this, I found some caveats I will share with the group. - It would have cost us only about $500 (20%) more to go with one of the miriad of "package it & sell it" houses that buy from Arrow et al and resell it to us. We now believe that this cost was minor compared to the delay we experienced. - A distributer is not equipped to do swap warranties. If your machine breaks after a few months, you may be without it for 8 weeks while the manufacturer gets around to fixing it. - In some cases the distributor can not help you to get funny cables, mounting shoes, strange formatting stuff, head cleaning cartridges. All this cost us about 2 weeks of hassle when we got the equipment. This also reduced our four week "swap-with-new-unit" warranty to about half that. - A VAR can offer further services if you need them, from answering simple and obvious questions, to being paid to get a device you need in a hurry ready in a hurry. A distributor can't offer that service. - Geof -- geof@aurora.com / aurora!geof@decwrl.dec.com / geof%aurora.com@decwrl.dec.com