Audio/Visual Professionals Say Reliability is Top Priority

Recently, Polyline surveyed more than 200 production/post production professionals about what they considered to be the most important factors when purchasing a hard drive. We asked them to rate the importance of a series of factors on a scale from 0 to 5, with 5 being the “most important” and 0 being “not important at all.” Respondents overwhelmingly rated reliability as the most important factor when selecting a hard drive (with an average rating of 4.84). In fact, 85% percent of the people taking part in the survey gave it a rating of “5” or “most important.”

While speed (4.39) and capacity (4.46) were also considered important by production/post production professionals, reliability seemed to be the overall, most important factor to the 200+ respondents.



Perhaps now is a good time to mention that Polyline carries "professional" hard drives (like LaCie, G-Tech and Avastor) designed specifically for production/post production professionals. That means they are designed to be fast, have high capacities and are, most importantly, reliable. (Check out Dean's article "Is there really a difference between your so-called professional hard drives and commercial hard drives?")

And, just because our customers said that reliability was important, it doesn’t mean that they have given up on getting a good deal. Users gave price an overall rating of 3.87. So, while not as important as reliability or other factors, respondents tell us that price is still important. But, then again, maybe they were afraid we’d raise our prices if they answered differently.

What did these hard core, hard drive users say was the least important factor? Having someone available to help them. (Ouch.)

Several of those taking our survey, lost some serious steam by the time we reached the section on what products you’d like to see us carry.

One product in particular had 76% of respondents saying “Yes, please carry this!” We’re talking to and researching several different manufacturers right now. As soon as we can place these items in our catalog, we’ll tell you which product got the most votes.

Speaking of winners, Doug Hyland of Indiana, won the LaCie Rugged Hard Drive with USB 3.0 interface. If you aren't privy to all the benefits of USB 3.0, check out the ASKDEAN blog where he takes a closer look at this interface. And, even if you didn't win a LaCie rugged, you can still get your own through our Web site.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the survey.