Sales

Schnitz Technology works closely with the business team at the Park City Apple Store. If you're considering a new Mac or iOS purchase, we can work with you to assess your needs and arrange a meeting for you with Park City's Business Specialist. You can also contact the business team directly via email or by calling (717) 295-8803.

Looking to upgrade your computer or buy a perhipheral? Contact us. We stock hard drives, memory, backup systems, and various peripherals. We also carry nearly every computer cable or adapter you'll ever need, including a wide selection of firewire cables.

Looking for a hard drive?

One product that has proven particularly popular is our custom hard drives. Available in any size, these drives feature aluminum enclosures of the higest quality with shock absorbers, a silent cooling fan, and a chipset from Oxford Semiconductor (Oxford makes the fastest, highest quality controllers). They support Firewire 800 (two ports, for daisy drives), Firewire 400, USB, and eSATA. For the drive mechanism, we buy whichever make and model has the best ratings for the size the customer requests and use only drives that run at 7200 RPM.

All hard drives are thoroughly tested before they leave our shop. We subject each drive to 24 hours of read/write tests over the entire surface of the hard drive. During this process, we monitor not just for failures, but also for anomalous increases of S.M.A.R.T. attributes, even if they don't yet meet the threshold for failure. We also check for suspicious drops in read/write speed that might not be reflected in the S.M.A.R.T. attributes. If a drive's condition is uncertain, we don't use it.

Even with the most thorough testing, some drives still fail. For these, we offer a 3-year warranty. Since these are our own drives, you don't have to mail them away. Just give us a call and then bring your failed hard drive in. If possible, we'll repair it while you wait and restore your data from your backups. If you don't have backups, we'll attempt to recover your data (see our data recovery page). During the warranty period, data recovery, to the best of our in-house abilities, is offered at no charge beyond your initial purchase of the hard drive.

Our hard drives do cost substantially more than what you would spend at placess like Best Buy, but there are substantial differences to consider. These drives typically run at 5900 RPM, are housed in flimsy plastic enclosure with marginal power supplies, and use a slower, inferior chipset. They typically support only USB, while we recommend Firewire 800. Firewire 800 can sustain speeds of 786 MBps while USB2 operates at a maximum of 480 MBps – a speed which it rarely actually achieves. Additionally, USB uses your CPU to coordinate data transfers, slowing down your whole computer. USB speeds also drop substantially as more devices are attached.

In practice, copying files over a Firewire 800 connection to a fast hard drive with an Oxford chipset is twice as fast as a cheap USB drive on a Mac. If what you're looking for is redundant storage of data to which you only need low-speed access, an inexpensive USB drive is a reasonable choice. If you need speed and reliablity, get something of higher quality.

RAID configurations and enterprise-class mechanisms are available.