Author Topic: 1T hard drive on sale $90: a good deal? (Read 11023 times)

Balog · « **on:** February 06, 2009, 01:01:52 PM »

From a Tiger Direct email: Hitachi 1T drive. Anyone have any experience with these? It seems to be well reviewed.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=4306125&sku=TSD-1000H4

CNYCacher · « **Reply #1 on:** February 06, 2009, 01:35:05 PM »

$0.09 / Gigabyte, unbelievable.

I remember when $0.10 / Megabyte was broken, and the world freaked out! It wasn't that long ago!

Brad Johnson · « **Reply #2 on:** February 06, 2009, 02:35:42 PM »

Heck, I remember when drives were $1000 per megabyte. Wholesale.

Brad

cfabe · « **Reply #3 on:** February 06, 2009, 03:54:37 PM »

My most recent hard drive purchase was a couple 80 gig drives for around $100 each what seems like only a few years ago. Still have those drives and if cleaned out they'd be maybe a quarter full of useful stuff. Just for laughs recently I looked online and saw the same thing, 1 Terrabyte drives for under $100. I was floored. I can't even imagine what I would possibly fill that drive up with. I guess if I lived in the city and downloaded movies all day long on FIOS I could see it, but it would take me about a year to fill that drive up if I were maxing out my current connection 24/7. Wow.

I do remember our first hard drive, an unbelievable 30 megs for I think around $800. Couldn't imagine ever filling that thing up.

Balog · « **Reply #4 on:** February 06, 2009, 03:56:32 PM »

Quote from: cfabe on February 06, 2009, 03:54:37 PM

My most recent hard drive purchase was a couple 80 gig drives for around $100 each what seems like only a few years ago. Still have those drives and if cleaned out they'd be maybe a quarter full of useful stuff. Just for laughs recently I looked online and saw the same thing, 1 Terrabyte drives for under $100. I was floored. I can't even imagine what I would possibly fill that drive up with. I guess if I lived in the city and downloaded movies all day long on FIOS I could see it, but it would take me about a year to fill that drive up if I were maxing out my current connection 24/7. Wow.

I do remember our first hard drive, an unbelievable 30 megs for I think around $800. Couldn't imagine ever filling that thing up.

All my wife's music, all mine, hi res pics, movies (Red vs blue ftw!), a bunch of games, emulators and their roms....... it goes faster than you'd think.

BryanP · « **Reply #5 on:** February 06, 2009, 04:00:42 PM »

Looks like Newegg has the same drive up for $88 and free shipping.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145233

Harold Tuttle · « **Reply #6 on:** February 06, 2009, 04:31:37 PM »

Just the installation of photoshop is now 4 times larger than the 80 meg harddrive
that used to contain PS, quark, an OS, a zillion fonts and months of work files

Brad Johnson · « **Reply #7 on:** February 06, 2009, 04:54:11 PM »

It takes upwards of a gig just to load WinDoze.

Brad

lee n. field · « **Reply #8 on:** February 06, 2009, 05:27:59 PM »

Quote

1T hard drive on sale $90: a good deal?

Yup. Just ordered out a pair for a guy, costing us $109 each. (HP sold him the system with 2 drives, and set it up RAID 0. And when you have RAID 0, inevitably one drive will die.)

Gewehr98 · « **Reply #9 on:** February 06, 2009, 05:37:01 PM »

You'd better buy two at that price, Balog.

All those files, and no backups?

You're tempting fate, in a big way.

Balog · « **Reply #10 on:** February 06, 2009, 05:44:36 PM »

G98: I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but fyi someone taught me a little trick about partitioning a drive and mirroring. :)

We don't have that much stuff on there atm. Maybe 300 gig. But we've deleted or moved to alternate storage a TON of stuff, and it'd be nice to have it centralized.

Gewehr98 · « **Reply #11 on:** February 06, 2009, 05:49:52 PM »

Not sarcastic.

Pragmatic, yes.

I just had another HD crap out on me, an 80Gb Western Digital in an external USB enclosure.

Luckily, it was mirrored to one of my several SnapServers, but once again, the mortality of devices with spinning platters became evident.

It'll be heading to the rifle range soon, with others, to suffer this fate:

http://neuralmisfires.blogspot.com/2009/02/data-integrity.html

Partitioning a hard drive is cool, but if the drive craps out, so do the partitions.

Buying a second 1Terabyte HD for that cheap would make good insurance, and Raid 1 or mirroring ain't a bad idea at all.

This IBM workstation I'm on now is running RAID 1, and I've already had the good fortune to replace one drive in the mirrored pair with no loss of data.

AJ Dual · « **Reply #12 on:** February 06, 2009, 05:50:56 PM »

Back in the 90's when I was a PC tech for a small local mom-n-pop computer chain, we got kind of jaded with all the smut we found on customer's PC's and started referring to storage in "porn units".

A 1 TB Drive would be a "LP drive" as in lottaporn...

Monkeyleg · « **Reply #13 on:** February 06, 2009, 06:04:43 PM »

Quote

Back in the 90's when I was a PC tech for a small local mom-n-pop computer chain...

What were you? Twelve years old then?

Gowen · « **Reply #14 on:** February 06, 2009, 06:42:09 PM »

Tigerdirect... If you think you got a good deal, count your fingers and toes and your family's fingers and toes. Seriously, If a rebate is involved, you will never see your money. Do a search on fatwallet.com about Tigerdirect.

Bigjake · « **Reply #15 on:** February 06, 2009, 06:54:27 PM »

Just be careful where it's made. If it says "China", stay the hell away from it. I've read that those things phone home on their own.

No commie HD's for me...

AJ Dual · « **Reply #16 on:** February 06, 2009, 07:22:56 PM »

Quote from: Monkeyleg on February 06, 2009, 06:04:43 PM

What were you? Twelve years old then?

Close.. nineteen.

Although I can say I wish I'd known you in high school.

If I'd brought someone in to American history class who'd seen the assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt when he visited Milwaukee, I'd have gotten lots of extra credit, I'm sure.

InfidelSerf · « **Reply #17 on:** February 06, 2009, 08:19:20 PM »

Not bad.. I recently bought 2 1TB Seagates for $110 each.
That puts my server at 3.8TB it's never enough space.
I can fill a 1TB drive in a few days.
Gotta have room for all those old A-Team episodes :p

But I've had a 500GB and 200GB drive start their slow death... so I'm leary of all the new larger drives.
I back everything up on dvd's time willing just to be safe.
What I really need is a 10TB network drive mirrored for 5TB of space. Yeah that would take care of me for a year.

KD5NRH · « **Reply #18 on:** February 07, 2009, 03:37:41 AM »

So, when are they going to have a laptop PATA version? Maybe then I can convince the Debian installer developers that defaulting to a 5G /usr partition on a >100G drive is kinda silly.

Besides, in a slim form factor, you could make them in pre-stacked pairs for a standard bay in a desktop, with a built-in RAID controller to mirror them.

(I still don't know why Debian in particular works fine if I let it decide the partitions, but always fails to work right if I partition manually. I've done it manually for plenty of other distros, but Debian always seems to have a major problem with at least one of the partitions.)

Thor · « **Reply #19 on:** February 07, 2009, 07:57:28 AM »

Hard to imagine that my first PC that I owned only had a 540 MB hard drive and 32 Meg of RAM.

AJ Dual · « **Reply #20 on:** February 07, 2009, 09:40:58 AM »

Quote from: Thor on February 07, 2009, 07:57:28 AM

Hard to imagine that my first PC that I owned only had a 540 MB hard drive and 32 Meg of RAM.

Mine had 512k of ram and a cassette tape drive.

And you were in constant peril of mistaking a tape of your BASIC programs for a music tape and sticking it in your Walkman.

SCREEEEEEEEEYYYAAOOOOOXXXZZZZZZZZBBUUUSSSSSSBBBEEEEEEEEEEEESCRAAWWWWWWWWWW...!

roo_ster · « **Reply #21 on:** February 07, 2009, 12:56:18 PM »

Quote from: AJ Dual on February 07, 2009, 09:40:58 AM

Mine had 512k of ram and a cassette tape drive.

And you were in constant peril of mistaking a tape of your BASIC programs for a music tape and sticking it in your Walkman.

SCREEEEEEEEEYYYAAOOOOOXXXZZZZZZZZBBUUUSSSSSSBBBEEEEEEEEEEEESCRAAWWWWWWWWWW...!

My first computer:
TRS-80 Color Computer with 16K RAM & cassette

RocketMan · « **Reply #22 on:** February 07, 2009, 01:43:41 PM »

Quote from: jfruser on February 07, 2009, 12:56:18 PM

My first computer:
TRS-80 Color Computer with 16K RAM & cassette

Mine was a TRS-80 Model I, 4K RAM and cassette. It was modded and tweaked and spindled and mutilated until it had the BASIC II interpreter, an expansion interface, a huge 48K of RAM, and two blazingly fast 180K floppy disks.
It was really cool in its day. I even built some interface circuitry that plugged into the expansion port so it could control stuff in the outside world. Man, that was fun!
I still have it around here someplace. I wonder if it works.

eta: Every time one of these threads takes a turn into describing the first computers some of us owned, it amazes me just how many ~~old~~ mature geeks we have around APS. Then comes the realization that "geek" is often synonymous with "gunny".

lee n. field · « **Reply #23 on:** February 07, 2009, 01:59:52 PM »

Quote

Mine was a TRS-80 Model I, 4K RAM and cassette. It was modded and tweaked and spindled and mutilated until it had the BASIC II interpreter, an expansion interface, a huge 48K of RAM, and two blazingly fast 180K floppy disks.
It was really cool in its day. I even built some interface circuitry that plugged into the expansion port so it could control stuff in the outside world. Man, that was fun!
I still have it around here someplace. I wonder if it works.

My first was a Model III. Basically the same, with all that stuff built in. It's been sitting in my folks' chicken house for 20 years. I wonder if it still works.

Manedwolf · « **Reply #24 on:** February 07, 2009, 02:15:38 PM »

Working with HD video, you can fill up a terabyte in less than a day.

Master files can be 50-100 GB easy.

Quote from: Bigjake on February 06, 2009, 06:54:27 PM

Just be careful where it's made. If it says "China", stay the hell away from it. I've read that those things phone home on their own.

No commie HD's for me...

I would like to see how an external firewire drive could manage that, really.

I do just try to avoid drives from China after horror stories about how awful the Deskstars got after IBM moved production there...

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Author Topic: 1T hard drive on sale $90: a good deal? (Read 11023 times)