SATA HD Sweetspot in a few years time?

[cfineman]

It seems pretty clear that right now 250GB is the sweet spot in drives today and it seems to have been there for quite some time. I am am setting up a RAID array that I want to be able to expand over time. The question is in a couple of years when I want to buy a couple more drives to throw on there, will it still be the sweet spot or are there new process techs comming down the pipe that will shift the sweet spot further up on the capacity axis?

 

[stu1811]

Capacity is always growing. I'm sure the "sweet spot" will be higher.

 

[brikis98]

well, perpendicular recording is new and should allow for drives with higher capacities to be cheap and more readily available. moreover, hard drive sweet spots are always increasing, so it's likely to go up to 320GB, 400GB and so on...

of a more interesting note is recently we saw some of the first flash based hard drives... once they mature, they should be way faster, cooler, quieter (no moving parts), etc... price is an issue now, but that should drop eventually too...

 

[Atheus]

I bought a couple of big drives for a RAID-1 array recently, and found the best price/capacity ratio on the Seagate 320GB perpendicular recording drives.

 

[Ayah]

Future technology will move the sweetspot up every year.

 

[SuperNaruto]

seagate envisions 2.5tb in 2009.. thats very close..

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/09/15/seagate_tb_hard_drives/

 

[cfineman]

Where did you buy them from?

At newegg it was nearly a wash between the wd@250 and the seagate@320 (~$.30/G) when considering each drive. Turns out for the raid 5 array i'm putting together initially it's more cost effective to buy the WD from a $/Gig perspective (at least at the 1TB level) (recall that you only get (N-1) drives to count towards capacity in raid 5).

What are people's favorite places to buy drives?

 

[krotchy]

seems to me the 320GB is the sweet spot now, as the price/gb is identical to the 250s now, but you get 70 more.

 

[cfineman]

You have to take raid 5 into account... check out the follow calcs using prices from NewEgg (pardon my LISP... I did it in EMACS). The main advantage right now in getting the 320s is that I have to buy new cages sooner and they are a bit faster... in the end we are only talking about 1-2 cents per G difference I will probably be going for the Seagate 7200.10's

(defun craid (n cap cost)
(let ((totalCap (* (1- n) cap))
(totalCost (* n cost)))
(format "%d for $%d @ %g/G" totalCap totalCost (/ (* 1.0 totalCost) totalCap))))

(craid 4 320 95)
"960 for $380 @ 0.395833/G"
(craid 5 320 95)
"1280 for $475 @ 0.371094/G"
(craid 6 320 95)
"1600 for $570 @ 0.35625/G"

(craid 5 250 75)
"1000 for $375 @ 0.375/G"
(craid 6 250 75)
"1250 for $450 @ 0.36/G"
(craid 7 250 75)
"1500 for $525 @ 0.35/G"