Using NewEgg, here’s the scoop on what hard drives cost right now.
Cheapest of the cheap: Hitachi Deskstar, 80GB, $32.99. And yes it is a SATA 3GB/s. Bear in mind a Western Digital flavor is just one dollar more.
King of the hill (price-wise): HP 347708-B22 147GB, $499. What makes this hard drive expensive is its 15,000 RPM. If you feel inclined to buy one of these, bear in mind it’s a SCSI interface.
Solid State Disks: All of them are still too expensive and makes the HP listing above look like a steal. See, the deal is that if you want SSD now, you’ll most likely need the controller card to go with it. And this can easily bust over $1,000. But even if you have the controller card and just want the SATA II SSD alone, 120GB can cost $400.
Drives that normal people would actually want
The 500GB drives are now below the $60 price point, many of which have free shipping.
1TB drives are now below the $80 price point. I can’t believe this is true but it is. If prices keep dropping at this rate, 1TB will be had for $50 by fourth quarter 2009.
Make no mistake, 1TB is huge. It will take you a good long time to fill that. But the problem that presents itself is how to back it up. The solution is to buy two 1TB drives. One for your primary; the other as backup.
Important note to Windows XP users concerning hard drives
A basic NTFS volume has a maximum recognized size of 2TB. With 64KB clusters, it is possible to achieve a 256TB dynamic volume.
If you intend to go over 2TB with NTFS, get educated on how to create or convert to dynamic volumes. Everything you need to know about those type of volumes is in that link. Read it and bookmark it.
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