I work at a company of ~200 people. We have an informal email list to which nearly everyone in the company subscribes. The list carries all manner of discussion, but perhaps the most common use of it is to sell things. I tried that today, listing miscellaneous gadgets that I’d otherwise have sold on eBay. Within an hour, I had a buyer for everything on my list. That wasn’t the interesting part, though. The interesting part was that in the first five minutes I received a dozen replies from people wanting to buy one specific item: an external USB hard drive of modest capacity. Nothing else I was selling, not even an iPod at a bargain price, elicited that kind of response.
In this particular sample population, there apparently is quite a demand for external disk drives. I suppose people are increasingly aware of the importance of backups. The inclusion of easy-to-use backup software in mainstream operating systems probably is a contributing factor.
