Archive for January 12th, 2004

50 cents per gigabyte seems to be the price of hard drives these days. In all cases, the only way to achieve 50 cents/gigabyte is to take advantage of rebates, so it isn’t the “I want to build a data library and need 2,000 200GB drives” price. DealMac has several deals listed and Fry’s has stacks of hard drives, several of which break down to 50 cents/gigabyte.

One year ago, the price was at least $1/GB and that was relatively slow drives. Now, 50 cents/GB buys you an 8MB cache on a 7,200 RPM drive with an 8 - 9 ms average seek time.

But the warranty period has been vastly reduced. Three to five years ago, drive warranties were typically 5 years. Then it dropped to 3. Now it is a 1 year warranty, but– at least with Western Digital– you can buy an additional 2 years for $15. Not sure I like that trend. Nope. Sure. Don’t like it.

I picked up a 160GB Western Digital to be used as the backing store for my encoded CD collection. The CDs will effectively act as a backup and I use the “Purchased Music” group in BackUp.app to back up the songs purchased from the music store.

I’m disappointed by two particular details of the current hard drive market. First, the only effective means of backing up such a large volume is through the use of RAID. But since drives are only sold at the discounted price by taking advantage of a one-per-household rebate, the second device is expensive (Actually, this turns out not to be the case for the WD drive; WD will honor up to two rebates per household!). Secondly, no one seems to have built a decent 1394 case with two drive bays that isn’t also significantly more expensive than a single device case.

How far we have come…

In 1987, I paid $1,400 for an 80 megabyte hard drive for my Mac Plus. Now, $1400 would buy nearly a terabyte without rebates (300 GB drives for $400) and 80MB is less space than the amount of RAM shipped in a typical system.