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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.
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.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
I'd applaud this too, if only the reliability weren't going down faster than the price. Hell, I'll sell you a 5-inch-footprint hunk of metal that won't work for just $50. I'll even stamp 50TB on it.
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.
More and more we are seeing that dependability, reliability, and faster access times are paramount to overall storage capacity of hard disk drives.
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.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
why is this modded down as flamebait?!?...it's just fact!?! this is OLD NEWS
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
That's great and all that they have disk space down to $1/GB, but what about some performance?
... but what are you going to get for that money ... probably a four banger ...
... but lets get real. If you have THAT much data, you're going to use the REAL thing.
...
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
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They don't exist anymore because there's no money in it for the manufacturers. The costs to create a 40GB drive (not to mention packaging and shipping) is likely only a few $$$ less than producing a 120GB drive. Since the 120 sells for twice as much, it obviously makes sense to promote those.
With that said, you can still get 20, 30 & 40 GB drives w/o much of a problem, just not at $1/GB.
Much of the price of the drive is independent of capacity. The additional platters and heads for high-capacity drives are significant, but so are the electronics and motors that are identical in 40G and 250G drives.
Hence, the cheapest $/byte drives to manufacture are the highest capacity drives. However the highest capacity drives are often sold at a premium, leaving the best price point somewhere in the middle.
They stop producing them as demand dries up. If their production line is churning out 40 gig platters, the drives are built with 40 gig platters. If they had to open a new factory every time they want to make a bigger platter, they wouldnt be 1$/gig - and legacy drives would cost just as much to make as ever.
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I now have 10x the HD capacity that I can afford to back up (DLTs are still insanely expensive) and the access and transfer speeds haven't changed in years.
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.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
At $1/Gig, you can have 240 GB of speedy (45 MB/sec), death-resistant (mirrored) storage for $500. That should make any pr0n user, scientist, or geek happy.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Even if you ripped DVD's into VOB's ... you'd still need to rip over 100 to justify even 1 TB
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.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Here's my question.. SDRAM is cheap as it gets.
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.
?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
But you didn't want to hear that.
Which also costs $1/TB.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
What percentage of personal computer users use more than 10GB of hard drive space? Seriously.
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.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
*Risks the wrath of the moderators by going off topic to release a bee from a bonnet*
:)
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'
' Ore stabit fortis a fine placet ore stat '
- found on a park bench
Falling prices is always a nice thing for consumers, but look out - quality is suffering, and companies like Maxtor have been accused of "stuffing the channel" to move more product.
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.
Yet tape drives are still around $30/GB! Who cares about big monster drives if you can't backup the data.
Hard drives still fail, you know.
-ted
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...
Seriously though, the reliability of these cheap high capacity drives suck.
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?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't need a 120G drive, 20G is plenty-- so when can I buy one for $20?... -- Kazoo
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