Getting ready for the Black Friday sales...

[boxfish]

52% Discount Sites
34% Cashback Sites
14% Content sites


Quidco and TopCashback must do huge volumes then, aren't they the only big players in the cashback arena?

 

[Edwin]

Yes, those are the two big cashback sites.

 

[boxfish]

Yes, those are the two big cashback sites.

Quidco has been down all day apparently - someone must be having a very, very bad day.

 

[Edwin]

Quidco has been down all day apparently - someone must be having a very, very bad day.

Wow, that could easily be a multi million pound mistake. And doubly ironic given that most ecommerce websites survived record traffic levels, unlike last year when many were effectively DDOSed for hours by the floods of visitors.

- 2014: chaos, punchups and near riots at the physical Black Friday sales (it was such bad PR for Asda that they are sitting out B.F. yet another year; knock on effect seems to be few queues as everyone moves to the peaceful safety of online)
- 2015: epic hosting failures (enough to move stock prices)
- 2016: mega cashback fail
- 2017: delivery system meltdown? (the industry's already redlining as it is, and the volume of parcels is likely to keep rising)

 

[AssetDomains]

I've been keeping an eye on namecheap in case they offer an EV SSL deal but there site has just been knocked offline not the best advert for a webhost when they cant keep there own site online is it.

- 2017: delivery system meltdown? (the industry's already redlining as it is, and the volume of parcels is likely to keep rising)

I've already had email from game saying that due to high volume of sales please be advised normal delivery times could be affected please allow upto 10 days

 

[accelerator]

I have seen a lot of people complaining about the way Amazon is presenting its Black Friday Deals this year. They are saying it's hard to find the Lightening Deals and a lot less exciting.

 

[DLOE]

Highest sale in the last hour was for a German retailer, with a €34.000 sale earning €2.720 in commission!

At least one affiliate has had a good day

http://www.awinblackfriday.com/ shows which affiliate retailers are doing well
tldr:
tesco direct
lookfantastic.com
john lewis
currys
very.co.uk

also:
46% web
32% mobile
21% tablet

 

[Edwin]

I'm looking for Hitachi (HGST) Hard Drives, minimum 4tb, and also some 16gb Ram sticks if anyone see's any deals. I bought the last half dozen (HDDs) off scan at £120 a pop (off the top of my head).

You'd have to check if they're compatible with your motherboard, but Amazon has the "Ballistix Sport LT 32GB Kit (16GBx2) DDR4" for £116.84 (at the time I posted this link; their prices keep fluctuating)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01DPSQQOC/?tag=acorn06-21

(I looked at the "usual suspects" for cheap PC parts, like Aria, CCLOnline, Ebuyer, Misco and Novatech but they didn't have any 2x 16GB RAM packages, regardless of manufacturer, under about £150)

As for the HDD, Scan seems (again) to have the best price. They have the "HGST 4TB MegaScale DC 4000.B CoolSpin Enterprise/NAS Class Hard Disk Drive" for £113.99+£5.48 postage, so right around what you paid last time. Other stores don't seem to have any HGST 4TB under £130.
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/4tb...ata-iii-6gb-s-64mb-cache-coolspin-5700rpm-ncq

 

[timter51]

I did go a bit buts this year, at least it was nuts for me! I got a Dell E5740 laptop, a Crucial MX300 750GB SSD for £104, Crucial MX300 500GB SSD for £84 and a Steam Link for £16. And tried to get most of the kids Xmas pressies sorted...

 

[Skinner]

Cheers @Edwin, I have 32gb in at the moment (2 sticks) and plan on going to 64gb. I want to start using a ram disk for video editing cache.

I saw these... http://amzn.to/2fUh0o8 at £50 per 16gb stick. Not right for me but still nicely priced.

I looked up when I bought the HDDs, I have 16,500 hours on them, so going back about 18 months, hard to believe the price hasn't really dropped that much.

 

[Edwin]

Cheers @Edwin, I have 32gb in at the moment (2 sticks) and plan on going to 64gb. I want to start using a ram disk for video editing cache.

I saw these... http://amzn.to/2fUh0o8 at £50 per 16gb stick. Not right for me but still nicely priced.

I looked up when I bought the HDDs, I have 16,500 hours on them, so going back about 18 months, hard to believe the price hasn't really dropped that much.

Actually, most PC parts have gone up in price in the UK* in the last year (CPUs especially). So to find them at the same price is pretty good going.

(*not necessarily true globally)

 

[Skinner]

I would have thought the price would have lowered like the 2tb F4 and Deskstars did,when the 3 and 4tb came out, now we have 5, 6, 8 and 10tb on the horizon (and around 10tb looking like a hard limit for mechanical) the price of ssd dropping,and m.2 ssd going into 1000s of teraabytes in a 3.5 form prices would be diving in storage.

There is a WD 2 bay NAS on Amazon coming up in the lightening deals, it contains a 4tb WD Red and the NAS at 240ish so I expect it will drop to 180 maybe, ill prob grab that and repurpose it to storage with a second red.

Anyone looking for a NAS this could be a good deal. I've never owned one before, so can't say too much.

 

[Skinner]

There's no edit button on my phone post or I can't see it. the NAS deal starts in about 20-30 minutes around 6:30pm.

 

[Edwin]

I think because HGST is just a Western Digital brand now (albeit with a different product mix), they're not particularly trying to be competitive.

 

[Skinner]

From what I've read, it seems WD bought Hitachi to bake Hitachi reliability into WD drives.

Looking at BackBlaze and other similar sites, WD failure rates are slowly dropping, where HGST are holding rock solid.

Without having notes to hand, i've not had a single Hitachi or HGST not Samsung F4 failure in 6-7 yrs, I'm only running a 16 total mixed 2-4tb though, 12 Hitachi/hgst and 4 sammys. in my experience Seagate may as well be chocolate fireguards, and only the WD Greens seemed solid, I've never used Reds though, but I bought one of those WD NAS, for cold storage.

Do you use any mech for storage?

 

[Edwin]

I'm pretty happy with WD Red. Two in my PC (2TB each), two in a NAS (4TB each), two specified in a friend's PC (3TB each). So far they're all performing perfectly.

Had plenty of Seagates fail over the years, and a few WD Blacks. In the "olden days" when drive capacities were low, I tended to upgrade before they failed because the improvement really made a huge difference.

 

[Edwin]

BTW, we were talking about SSD earlier in this thread. HotUKDeals lit up over the Crucial MX300 525GB version, which is down to £80.49 in Amazon's Cyber Week sale https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01IAGSD68/?tag=acorn06-21

 

[Edwin]

It's that time of the year again! Even though Black Friday itself isn't for another week, the sales have started in earnest at many retailers. Amazon launched its deals last night, Currys/PC World have already been at it for days, as have Argos etc.

My tips in the first post of this thread still stand. https://www.acorndomains.co.uk/threads/getting-ready-for-the-black-friday-sales.143605/

Don't forget to join QuidCo and TopCashback to get money back on a lot of your shopping. You don't pay anything extra, it's literally free cash, and it can be hundreds of pounds for high-ticket items or service contracts (e.g. mobile phones or broadband contracts).

(If you do join TopCashback it would be brill if you used my referral link: https://www.topcashback.co.uk/ref/newmembership )

Here are links directly to the "live" Black Friday deals at various merchants:
Currys
Amazon
Argos
eBuyer
eBay

Also, keep an eye on HotUkDeals.com as new stuff is being flagged every couple of minutes. If an offer goes "hot" it's probably worth a closer look if it's something you were thinking of buying anyway.

Separate to all that, Dell has some great deals going at the moment on some of their Inspiron range of laptops. You'll have to hunt around (or check HotUKDeals) but some qualify for both an instant £100 off, and a parallel £100 cashback (both offers run until November 22).
http://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptop-and-2-in-1-pcs/sc/laptops/inspiron-laptops

Happy hunting!

 

[AssetDomains]

PlayStation have knocked £100 of some VR headset bundels available at a number of retailers. Has anyone seen them in action

 

[martin-s]

Edwin should be the new Martin Lewis. Who's with me?