One-dimensional nanostructures (nanowires, nanotubes, nanosprings, etc.) hold immense technological promise, specifically, in electrical applications. This is for the obvious reason that they are amenable to applying electrical contacts, i.e. building a device or sensor. At first blush, one would assume that in order to observe the rich physics of electron transport in these structures that devices must be constructed from a single nanostructure. I will demonstrate through a review of a number of experiments with gallium nitride nanowires and ZnO coated nanosprings that this is not always true. Some phenomena, such as the resonant photoconductivity of a gold decorated gallium nitride nanowire, which arises from plasmonic coupling of Au nanoparticles to the optical modes of the gallium nitride nanowire wave guide, is unobservable in a device constructed from an array of randomly order Au decorated gallium nitride nanowires. Alternatively, I will present experiments with ZnO coated silica nanosprings, both for a single nanospring device and a random array of these structures, that the same physics and electron transport is observed. In the end, I hope to demonstrate that the choice of device design, a single 1-D nanostructure or an array, depends on the phenomena you want to explore.