How to get a cheap hard drive (or other computer parts) on ebay

Driving back to Eugene today from a trip to Portland I decided to make a quick stop over at Fry's Electronics in Wilsonville, I had been working hard of doing house repairs and needed food, gas, and a little enjoyment of being surrounded by tech. toys. I was hoping for a killer deal on SATA notebook hard drive. Fry's sometimes has great unadvertised specials and who knows this might have been my lucky day.
My hp pavilion has a bay for a second hard drive and I thought that would be a perfect place to install a new version of Free Ubuntu Linux on. I need a new platform to test out Linux software and having it on it's own internal hard drive to dual boot from is a perfect solution.
I wasn't looking for much really, you can get a lot of hard drive these days for not much money and I thought if I could find a $25 deal I would be pretty happy with it. Well today wasn't my lucky day at Fry's, the cheapest drive they had was a 250 Gig SATA for $49.95. It was not the deal I was looking for, the sales person tried hard but I knew I could do better than that.
When I got home I fired up my computer and headed over to ebay, now ebay has a lot of stuff and you can play the buyer game anyway you want. Online auction or if you find a good deal use the Buy It Now button and just get it now. When looking for something like a hard drive or other computer parts your best bet for a good deal is the Buy It Now button. But you have to filter it correctly and you might not find the price you are looking for the first time. But it won't take long for you item/price to pop up.

This is what I did:
I maneuvered through the menus to get to Internal Laptop Hard drives
I then selected 200-299 GB
On the top right of the listing click on the down arrow next to sort
Select Price + Shipping lowest first
On the left I filtered by selected Buy it now - Now I only saw listings with Buy it Now

Scroll past the broken hard drives, and WHALA one listing for $24.99 for a 250 GB Hard drive. They had eight but couldn't guarantee the brand. I wanted more certainty that I was going to get the correct drive.  Below that listing was a Toshiba drive for $27 with free shipping, guaranteed to work and the specs were right.This looked like the one. The seller had a good rep so I hit the buy it button. Other ads on ebay had the same drive selling for around $44 so it looked like I had found a good deal.
The drive was used but is no biggie to me and it was essentially the same drive they were selling at Fry's for $49.95
Many people just want to move the product, and don't want to try and hold out for a few dollars more. I once put a 1 Gig Kingston RAM stick on ebay with a buy it button just a little cheaper than what others were selling it for with free shipping and had someone buy it before I had the next thing listed that I was putting on ebay. If you want something to move fast it's always good to do a bit of research on what others are selling for and just beat them at the price.
Dan