What Hardware Should I Stock?

I was recently asked via email about how I handle stock as a self employed computer technician. You want be able to carry enough stock to be able to do your job, but you don’t want to be holding onto too much because their value can decline so quickly. Here’s what I do:

Buy one or two of the essentials. With the exception of motherboards which I only keep in my workshop, I carry each of the essentials when I go onsite and a copy in the workshop.

I consider the essentials to be:

Various RAMs
One of the current generation, one of the last generation and some laptop ram. I carry plenty of RAM because I don’t worry about it losing value. The lifetime value of RAM tends to be shaped like the letter “J”. The value falls until it hits rock bottom but once the manufacturers stop making it the value goes up and people put them into older computer that could use a little speed boost. In fact, sometimes its more of a “U” shape where the value of the RAM goes back up and equals or even beats the price of the item when you bought it new.
As for RAM brands, I tend to go for Kingston because of its build quality and lifetime warranty

Mid Range Harddrive
A mid range hard drive tends to hold its value relatively well. You pay a premium to get the larger ones on the market, then they fall to mid range rapidly and then slowly fall into low range. If I don’t sell them for a few months I usually put them into a generic office machine that doesn’t need a lot of space or use them to replace hard drives in old PCs.
For hard drive brands, I used to be a Western Digital man but now I have switched to Seagate for my clients because of their 5 year warranty. Avoid Maxtor like the plague, I see these dieing all the time.

Middle Range Video Card
Do NOT buy high end cards unless you already have a buyer, after a month or two a high end video card is no longer high end . Besides, most home and business users have low to mid range cards and the high end users usually already know to fix their computers. I carry a AGP, PCI Express and a handful of old second had ones. The brand I like for video cards is ASUS or Gigabyte with an nVidia chipset.

Motherboards
As mentioned before, I only keep motherboards in my workshop because I dont do motherboard replacements onsite. I carry a middle priced Intel socket 775 and sometimes an AMD AM2 (I rarely see AMD’s in Australia though). I also keep a handful of socket 478 motherboards because socket 478’s are old enough to be failing from age and they are getting harder to find now days. The motherboard brand I like the most is Gigabyte. While they arent the best for gaming and overclocking, you cant beat it in regards to build quality.

The price of anything below this point I usually don’t worry about de-valuation.

Wireless Broadband Router
I tend to sell alot of Wireless Broadband Routers. I usually buy them without inbuilt modems because in Australia the ISP supplies the modem 95% of the time so I just need the router itself. I usually buy higher end models because wireless routers can be troublesome with hanging, rebooting or having a spotty signal issues. If it has problems, It’ll annoy the client and look bad on you.
The router brand I usually go for is Netgear.

Power Supplies
I go for mid range power supplies as cheap power supplies can cause more problems than they are worth. The brand of my power supplies changes depending on the availability.

Network Cables
I carry various lengths of pre made cables (I’m too lazy to make my own), from 1m up to 50m. I seem to be selling these all the time and they dont lose value so I have no problems carrying plenty of them.

DVD Burner
I usually just buy something that’s a good price/speed at the time. Most of the time recent burners that are easily available to consumers are around $50. I sell a few of these a month to people with either bad burners or want to upgrade an old computer to be able to burn DVDs. I have found LiteOn to be a really good brand for burners. I used to like Pioneers but lately I have been encountering many of them failing so I am getting turned off Pioneer.

Spare Cables
A cable that I sell all the time are A-B USB cables to be used on new printers. I dont know why printer manufacturers don’t include this cable that is essential to its operation.

Other spare cables are sometimes needed are computer power cables, Molex to Sata power cable, a Molex power splitter, PATA and SATA data cables.

Network Cards
I don’t sell many network cards now days but occasionally the need pops up. Most of the time they go into older computers that don’t have onboard lan or I am installing a Gigabit card into a modern computer. I like Surecom for 10/100 network cards and TP-Link for Gigabit cards as both are cheap and reliable.

There are many more things that I stock such as sound cards, modems, spare fans but I rarely sell any of them so I haven’t classified them as essential stock; at least for someone just starting out anyway.

If you have a store and want to show what you have, dont buy heaps of hardware to fill the shelves, just keep the empty boxes when you do system builds. This also doubles as a way to prevent theft since all they would be taking is the box.

If you want to see what non-essential stock I carry onsite, check out my “Onsite Technician Gear” article.