Hard Drives Down To A Dollar A Gigabyte

Junky191 writes "I doubt anyone else noticed this- but today is the first day where mass storage is available for $1 per gigabyte (according to pricewatch,). There are several stores now selling 120GB models for $120 shipped. This is truly an amazing milestone for those of us who once spent $500 for the fantastically large 10MB models. I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB." With discounts, the price has been that low for a little while.

Captain Obvious Strikes Again

[Monkelectric]

The prices for HD's have been down around 1$/gig for months, especially on surplus stores like comp-geeks.com (new, not used).

$100 per Megabyte

[Anonymous Coward]

1982: Datamac 18meg, $1800, full height 5 1/4", Dos 1.x mapped to multiple drive letters, dedicated full length controller, had a desk fan blowing into a uncovered PC, and we liked it!

Re:error

[crow]

Bzzzt.

You're right that TB is TereByte. However, a TB is the next step up from GB, not the other way around.

GB=2^30 or 10^9 if you're a lying drive manufacturer
TB=2^40 or 10^12
PB=2^50 or 10^15
EB=2^60 or 10^18

Re:$1/TB?

[Etcetera]

the days of multi terrabyte storage systems for the home is a little further off. Unless someone comes out with more justification for that much space

When virtual reality (fully 3d, immersed environments) start to appear and be used in the home, there'll be a need for this kind of storage. Combined with processor advances to do the massive crunches needed for such an interface/game/devetool/whatever... the average home user will finally have the ability to experience it.

Given the advances in OS engineering, i'd put the initial uses of this (at home) in six years or less.

I don't think we'll be at $1/TB for a decade though (10 years ago we were at $1000/GB). And I agree, we don't need storage space to be *quite* that low for VR itself to take off.

IMHO.

30 Gig for $29 at Staples

[adrew]

On black Friday I bought a 30GB Maxtor for $29 (!) after rebate.

It wasn't all that long ago (early 90's) that hard drives were a still a dollar a megabyte.

62 cents per Gig

[ChopsMIDI]

The day after thanksgiving, A buncha friends and I stood in line for 3 hours at 4AM to each get an 80 Gigger for $50 (and they threw in an extra 256MB stick).

Best Buy Rules.

Hmm

[loraksus]

I have to say that single hdd for cheap is cool, but not as impressive in the price drop on arrays, etc.
I recently got a 10KRPM [10 drives] 40GB Rack mount ultra wide scsi 2 array with hot swap and a 32mb cache for $40. I thought this was an insane deal, this thing cost thousands new, but then I looked at ebay and it is more or less in the same price range as other similar systems - that, imho is the most impressive [except perhaps for the 0 frames dropped while recording video :) ]

Re:Captain Obvious Strikes Again

[stratjakt]

Ask a silly question..

http://www.pcliquidators.com/

Look in the dollar bin, As-Is hard drives for a buck. Pulls from systems, not guaranteed. I snagged a handful of em on another order, and they worked fine for the purpose (booting a headless router setup). I got a 3.6 gigger that worked fine.

Of course, if you want a tested and error free pull, it's 20 bucks.

Re:Now if only they were as reliable...

[klparrot]

You get much faster data rates

With RAID 1 (mirroring), your write rate is no faster; if anything, it's slightly slower. But you're right when it comes to read performance; it can be up to twice as fast, with the two drives behaving like a stripe set.

Re:Perspective...

[cr@ckwhore]

FYI, the parent post is a quote taken from this web page: http://www.angelfire.com/pq/pcmuseum/storage.html

Pricewatch Isn't A Good Indicator

[ispel]

Many venders with lowest prices on PriceWatch, provide either bad or fraudulent service. Choose a reputable site with credentials (newegg.com) or your local retailer to get your prices and merchandise. The best place to check out a online business is various consumer review sites by typing in the company's name into Google (sample link to review of vender w/the $120 price on the HD [resellerratings.com]). Pay particular attention to the most recent comments when reviewing a company.

Re:Buck a gig

[zootread]

Why have twice your RAM in swap? Check this link for an explanation [san-francisco.ca.us]. Note that it doesn't apply to Linux. On my Linux box I have 768MB RAM and 512MB swap space and it runs nicely.

Re:First Hard Drive

[RogerWilco]

You are talking about the low level format you could do on MFM and RLL drives, to get the interleave right. This was done by invoking the format program stored in the BIOS of your harddisk controller,
most of the time it would the code would be at adress C0000 or C8000,
C0000 = 784kb, thus well above the 640kb DOS used.
with debug you could start running code at any memory address.
After IDE and the 286 came along this was no longer necessairy, as the 286 was fast enough to work without interleave, and the harddisk BIOS was no longer a separate BIOS, but you could do your Harddisk settings in the normal BIOS, thus all HD's now ship with an interleave of 1, and you can no longer do a low level format on a drive.

Adriaan.

Re:Buck a gig

[The_K4]

The reason taht some OSes like the 1:1 relationship the artile talks about is that in some OSes the data in RAM gets written to the swap space durring "free" cycles. This means that if room is needed in RAM that page can be jettosoned without having to do a write back then. So if your OS does this, and your not currently using RAM much you *should* have an exact copy of most of the pages on the HDD. If you suddenly start doing a MASSIVE amount of calculations on something that is currently not in ram at all, you don't have to swap all those current pages out (they have alreadys been copied there) just dump them and load the new stuff. The less writing you have to do before you load the faster you can get the load done.

Re:200GB WD drive for $200 after rebates ...

[default luser]

SOUNDS like a great idea to have a Flash long-term storage paired with a DRAM Ramdrive. But then, most of you don't know how slowly flash reads and writes compared to standard DRAM, or even a hard disk.

Typical read speeds for Flash top out at 4MB/s
Typical write speeds top out at 2.5MB/s

These numbers are about 10x slower than performance drives of today. Sure, you could have a nice 1GB DRAM drive containing your OS, backed up by a Flash bank. But the damn thing would take 4 minutes to boot, copying the image from the Flash to the DRAM. Set-top devices don't have the overhead of having to run programs, the OS and all applicable pieces are tucked away in 16 or 32MB of Flash, and obviously that doesn't translate well when you have something more complex like a full-featured computer.

Speculative saves to the Flash would cut down on the power-down time and reduce the chance of information loss, but writing to the Flash thousands of times a day is not good for it. You'd have to be sure to exclude caches from the speculative saves.

Try 200G for $199 (almost)

[Grumpman]

Right now Micro-Center [microcenter.com] has the WD 200Gb drives for $199, (after 20% off, in store rebate and a $65 mail in rebate). I just got one and it'sa vera nice!

Got a Micro-Center near you? Check here [microcenter.com]

Re:Buck a gig

[quinto2000]

less than a cup of tea.

Re:Yeah, great

[Regul8or]

I am the statistic. I used to work in a data center doing sys admin work and we had about 30 IMB hard drives ranging from 30-60 GBs. Keep in mind this is a data center. The temperature was always kept nice and cold, the humidity was controlled, and the power was conditioned through a UPS with battery backups and a diesel generator... the whole nine yards. Thankfully most of these drives were put in relatively unimportant servers, but in the end about 75% failed.

Having no swap is DANGEROUS

[r6144]

Maybe you have more memory than you ever need. But in case memory run a little tight, if there were no swap, the OS just have to drop the read-only pages (like most executable code) while leaving many rarely-used r/w (like data) pages in RAM. So there will definitely be MORE thrashing if RAM happen to be a little scarce (when you mistakenly started something twice, etc.).

I once used KDE1 on a 32MB system, and it run quite smoothly. One day I did some configuration and forgot to turn on swap. After typing startx, the system nearly thrashed to death, and it took me three minutes to exit KDE normally.