Hard Drive prices suck!

[Lonyo]

If hard drives are no cheaper, I will eat an elephant.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Hard drives are the only thing that don't seem to drop in price... a year ago I paid $130 for an XP2500, now they're $80. A year ago I bought my brother an 80 GB hard drive for $90... now they're $80... WTF???

Obviously you haven't watched the price of 120 GB and 160 GB drives plummet. With HDs the very cheapest models don't drop much, but neither do the cheapest CPUs. The right way to look at it is capacity -- $90 now gets you 120 GB instead of 80, and $100 gets you 160 GB.

 

[Acanthus]

I think what he is referencing is that old models dont get any cheaper, they are simply replaced with new models.

You still cant get a HD under $60 (unless its on sale/rebate)

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
I think what he is referencing is that old models dont get any cheaper, they are simply replaced with new models.

You still cant get a HD under $60 (unless its on sale/rebate)

And what's wrong with that? At least this way the $/MB ratio keeps coming down on the newer drives.

 

[EeyoreX]

It wasn't that long ago that my first retail hard drive purchase cost me $320 for an 800MB drive. Within the last five-six years. I think that hard drive prices are insanely low relatively speaking. You can get many brand spanking new drives for around $1/GB. That's not bad IMO.

\Dan

 

[Gagabiji]

Originally posted by: Pariah
No, $150 for a 200GB drive with no rebates? Look at the prices of those a year ago. The lowend isn't going to drop much because there isn't any room to drop.

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: nitromullet
I disagree. Two years ago, I bought a 40GB for $100. Plus, if you shop around, you can get that 80 GB for less.

A WD800JB for less than $80 retail? Don't think so... after rebates? Sure... but I'm still waiting on my $60 rebate from MY WD800JB that I bought 2 years ago :|

Did you contact them? Only once have I had a problem getting a rebate from WD. After it was late I contacted them, and they sent me a new check in a week.

You waited 2 years and now you "might" contact them?

 

[Sid59]

they prices drop hard when the bigger drives come out. Usually only the next biggest size drives drop in price.

bought a 250 gig for like 110 after rebates and i did get my rebates back. can't argue with that considering a few years ago i bought a 120 gig for like 140 bucks.

 

[Cerb]

The low-end of HDs doesn't change that fast..there's amnufacturing cost, here.
The high-end prices drop significantly.
When you got your 80GB for $80, how much were the 120GB and 160GB drives?

 

[modedepe]

IMO, hard drive prices are great if you don't mind messing with rebates (which I don't). You can get an 80gb for $40AR easily, even cheaper on occassion if you shop around.

 

[warhorse]

As everyone else has said, hard drives are really getting cheaper.

I think the real question should be: why aren't hard drives getting _faster_. I bought a 7200RPM drive 4 years ago, and they're still standard? Seek times haven't really changed since I bought that drive either.

 

[Ionizer86]

Hard drives have gotten faster Despite the RPM spin speeds, enhancements such as cache and platter density have upped speeds quite a bit.

I remember looking at benchmarks before with the then-standard 40GB 7200RPM drives such as the DM8 and the WD400BB getting about 40MB/s transfer, and now, we have drives like the DM9+ and 7200.7+ getting about 60MB/s. That's 50%.

As for the rebate issue: would you rather pay $80 for a hypothetical drive or pay $80 for the same drive with a chance to rake in $40 more from rebates? If you're cool with rebates, you can get really cheap stuff. I got a WD800JB for $20 a few months ago, no coupon needed.

 

[Boobers]

Kids these days! Jeeze!

I once paid $550 for a 9 Gb SCSI HD which also needed a $280 Adaptec 2940UW controller card.
(And a Western Digital 7200RPM IDE HD of today could kick it's butt...)

 

[AIWGuru]

No they don't.
YOU suck!

 

[Cerb]

I would just like to say that we have gotten much faster HDs than what you portray.
146GB, 10000RPM, ~6ms, ~70MB/s, and 73GB, 15000RPM, ~5ms, ~75MB/s.
The difference is that the RAM in servers only costs about 40% more than what's in desktops, assuming 1GB amounts (for 512, the difference is even less, closer to 25%), as that's about as high as most resellers have. Hard drives in servers start at 100% more and go up, not counting controller and cable costs.

Also, when command queuing starts to get used, SATA RAID 5 will be an excellent option, as seek times will begin to matter less than they do now, and you will still get an excellent speed increase (BTW, RAID 0 can not change access times).

I agree, RAID is not the solution to the hard drive problem; but brining technologies long used in SCSI to commodity drives is an excellent solution.

My last criticism is that many of us now have mice with no moving parts, even relays, bringing the mechanical count down to keyboard (some don't have "moving parts" technically, but mine sure does), HD, optical drives, and most monitors.

 

[optimistic]

Early 2001 45GB IBM 75GXP....................$150 oem
Early 2002 60GB Hitachi...........................$100 oem fry's
Late 2002 80GB WDSE.............................$73 retail cc
Late 2003 80GB WDSE.............................$65 oem mwave
Early 2004 80GB Seagate 8mb cache.......$50 retail bb

No rebates on all. I hate rebates.

 

[Gerbil333]

I don't know what you're talking about. They seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper as the years go by. I paid $50 for a used IBM 20gb Deskstar 2 years ago, and now I can almost get a brand new 40gb drive for that price!