Hard Drives Down To A Dollar A Gigabyte 736
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.
it's all relative (Score:5, Insightful)
And at the same time, our storage needs are 2^10 times as large due to 10^3 more data, 10^3 more illicit mp3's, 10^3 more pr0n, 10^3 more overhead in a microsoft binary document format, etc., etc., etc.
Now if only they were as reliable... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in other words, I agree that it is a milestone, but I think they are already pushing the technology and cutting QA corners to get the price point. I will always either pay more for my drives, or by about 20% lower capacity than the biggest cheap drives (usually the latter, because I'm cheap, cheap, cheap!). That way I seem to avoid the semi-annual crash/replace/rebuild ritual.
Size doesn't matter (Score:2, Insightful)
Is a 100GB hard drive even worth $100.00 if it suddently stops spinning or the disk access arm breaks off after two years of use?
I do appreciate the storage capacities going higher as time progresses, but I do not appreciate the craftsmanship decreasing at such a rapid rate that warranties are now down to a year for your typical drive rather than 10 years as it should be.
Re:This is old news. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Now if only they were as reliable... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mayhaps you are exaggerating, or perhaps your semi-annual crash/replace/rebuild is caused by another problem?
Frankly, I'd rather spend 120$ for a 1 year warranty drive than 500$ for a 3 year one. Simple math shows it to be cost-effective.
Where's the beef ... er .. speed? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is like saying you can buy a new car for less than $10k
Now when they get SCSI drives into that lower price range, that will be something to celebrate!
Besides, who is really going to run a database that requires that much disk space (120 GB) on an IDE drive??? yes, I know you could use IDE RAID
Sorry to be the party pooper, but I think the "celebration" is a bit premature
Just my $0.02
Re:Those were the days (Score:4, Insightful)
With that said, you can still get 20, 30 & 40 GB drives w/o much of a problem, just not at $1/GB.
Re:Those were the days (Score:4, Insightful)
Hence, the cheapest $/byte drives to manufacture are the highest capacity drives. However the highest capacity drives are often sold at a premium, leaving the best price point somewhere in the middle.
Re:Those were the days (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like chip fabs - where are the new 486dx's for me to build cheap routers out of?
Newer XBoxes are shipping with 20gig drives, even though they only partition and use 8. 8 gig drives just dont exist, 20 gigs is the cheapest option.
Now quit fighting progress. I like my 120 giggers.
Speed not capacity (Score:2, Insightful)
How about an 80 Gig drive that lasts 5 years and can transfer at about 1 Gig per second that costs $200. THAT I would buy.
Time for RAID-10, and real OSes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:$1/TB? (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you know that DVDs only have a resolution of 720x400 (16:9 proportions) and that the maximum resolution of HDTV is 1920x1080?
Thats 7.2 times as many pixels.....and we are still talking compressed data here (VOB is MPEG encoded).
If in the future we switch to uncompressed data (which would be a good thing) we are definately going to need TB drives.
And what if the industry decides to move to 60fps instead of the traditional 24fps for film and 30fps for TV? Double the frames, double the data.
Trust me, we'll need it.
Re:200GB WD drive for $200 after rebates ... (Score:3, Insightful)
So why can't I have a couple gigs of that in my system instead of a paging file on the hard drive?
512 megs of primary system ram (DDR333) and 2 gigs of secondary (PC133/100/66). That'd be a huge performance boost over swapping to that ridiculous spinning piece of magnetic media.
Stick 2 gigs of it on a PCI card - present it to the system like a secondary IDE controller (like disk-on-chip), just configure OS of choice to use it.
?
Re:Expands to fill.. (Score:5, Insightful)
But you didn't want to hear that.
Re:Now if only they were as reliable... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a business, saving $140 over three years for choosing the cheaper drive is going to make you look very stupid when that drive fails.
One single extra day of lost work for one single employee might very well cost more than what you saved.
Simple maths? I don't think so.
To another disk (Score:3, Insightful)
Which also costs $1/TB.
In all seriousness... (Score:2, Insightful)
If a person isn't determined to use their computer for a PVR, a digital video workstation, or an international citizen tracking database, it might be better to spend the money for a top-notch SCSI hard drive of about 30 to 40 GB.
$250 buys a 36GB 10,000RPM Ultra 320 hard drive with a 1,200,000 hour MTBF and a five-year warranty. The extra price buys: faster seek times, less latency, higher bandwidth, longer drive life, a manufacturer that stands behind their product...and better peace of mind.
Why should a person jump through technically-complex hoops, such as IDE RAID, just to be comfortable with cheap and unreliable hard drives? A single high-performance hard drive coupled with a recovery plan in the slight chance it breaks could be a better plan. My idea of a recovery plan is: a known configuration that can be remade from OEM CD-ROMs plus personal data backups (e.g., CD-RW).
Computer components are so damn cheap anymore, that the money we would have spent on just the basics years ago can now go towards quality and reliability.
Re:Now if only they were as reliable... (Score:2, Insightful)
No, you have redundancy. Backups are the thing you do twice every night and take offsite to different, hazard-proof locations with physical security.
Right?!?
Unreliable floppy disks (Score:3, Insightful)
Finally! Someone else notices the problem!
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I'm sure floppy disks aren't as reliable as they used to be. I can remember carting 3.5" disks around the place for *ages* before they died out... now it seems that if you drop one of the things then it will become unusable.
So, who is behind it? Is it the manufacturers of the floppy drives, or the manufacturers of the floppy disks? Have Iomega secretly bought out every single one of the floppy disk manufacturers?
Oh well, it gives an opportunity for even young people to state 'They don't make them like they used to'
It's a mixed blessing though... (Score:2, Insightful)
These low prices are a result of cut-throat competition akin to that in the "0% financing" car industry -- the manufacturers aren't profiting, so there won't be very good support down the line. Look at IBM - they sold their (previously crappy) hard drive line to Hitachi. Additionally, virtually all of the IDE/ATA drive manufacturers have cut their warranties to 1 year OR LESS!
I personally had an 80 GB IBM deskstar die in December (3 months after manufacture). It cost just over $3,000 to get the thing recovered by a data recovery shop (the thing wouldn't power up, so no, Norton Utilities was not an option).
HOWEVER - now that big drives are so cheap, look for (and implement if you can afford it) IDE RAID-1 configurations (mirroring) to save money and increase reliability.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:it's all relative (Score:5, Insightful)
Sound files are not getting much bigger per minute. Totally uncompressed audio is no more than 5MB/min tops in a format like shn.
Video isn't going to get a heck of a lot bigger than DVD-Video sizes.
I mean, the 40MB drive I had just over a decade ago, no music, no video. And that's what's driving it.
Unless someone finds a huge new use for space (delete microsoft joke) then maybe it'll at least slow.
course it won't stop immediately. But Music, then Video drove expansion in size. What NEW is coming along to do that?
And yet everything will be slower..... (Score:2, Insightful)
You know that sorting algorithms won't get better than O(NlgN) and searching algorithms won't get any better than O(lgN).
And access times of HDs haven't improved much in the last 10 years (bulk transfer has, though).
I know CPU's are now much faster... but also software developers became sloppier (think of the first C compiler running in a 4Kbyte RAM machine).
So... what all this means?
Probably we'll just have to wait longer...
I know... maybe I'm worring too much...
Re:It's a mixed blessing though... (Score:2, Insightful)
So where is my 50 cent 1/2 gigger? (Score:3, Insightful)
The recent reduction in warranty length should have proven that to most anyone.
Where are the smaller, and more reliable ones, being sold for these costs?
Ok fine, so when can I get a hard drive for $25? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Perspective... (Score:2, Insightful)