Angling for Terabytes: Unprecedented Deals on Storage
A few months back, I was at an event held by Microsoft Research where some of the company’s eggheads were discussing the implications for technology users of rapidly increasing storage capacities for rapidly decreasing costs. Apparently, at Microsoft Research, a favorite concept is that as it becomes common to get a terabyte of capacity, it will also become common for people to overhaul their storage habits. Specifically, they make the point that a terabyte is enough storage to archive audio files for every conversation you will ever have in your life.
For whatever that’s worth, there is no question that great deals on high capacity drives are now upon us, especially if you’re willing to order online. Whether you’re in the market for a new computer, or you want to upgrade a drive, or you want an external drive, unprecedented deals abound.
For example, just this week, Iomega introduced a group of hard drives within its Home Network Hard Drive line with 500GB capacities for $199 each. The company also has a 360GB drive available for $149. Those kinds of prices are what we used to associate with low-capacity external drives. That’s not all, though.
If a terabyte drive represents the holy grail for you, pay attention to a few other recent announcements. Seagate is getting set to ship a set of 1TB drives within its Barracuda line for $399.99 per drive, where the cost-per-gigabyte is almost exactly in line with Iomega’s.
If you go for your terabyte drive within a new computer you’re buying, you can get an even better deal. For example, Dell and its subsidiary Alienware have been offering terabyte drives from Hitachi within select PCs, including XPS, Aurora and Area 51 systems, for about $320. That makes the cost-per-gigabyte significantly lower than what Iomega and Seagate are offering.
Meanwhile, there are also some extraordinary deals appearing in external and removable drives. Dell is offering a Western Digital 160GB external hard drive, in its Passport line, for $93. I have found external hard drives to be a very convenient way to share backed up data between home and office computers. As you can see from the photo here, where the WD drive is sitting next to a laptop, it’s about the size of a paperback book.
The bottom line: If you’re looking to add to your storage arsenal, the prices and the capacities are very attractive at the moment.
Do you have any storage tips?
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Any opinions on the WD MyBook drives? I purchased the 500GB model for backups about 6 months ago.
I have just ordered a WD MyBook Premium 750 GB external hard drive this morning… only to find out, after completing the order, that they accept “only major US credit cards”. Not sure yet if they’ll be able to honor my order with a VISA card issued in Romania. If they don’t, I’m certainly NOT going for a WD… I’ll look at either Iomega or Seagate.
My 4-year-old 160-GB WD external hard drive is perfectly fine, though, surviving multiple computers and a laptop HDD failure.
I’ve also been looking at the eSATA dual interface options. Do you think within 1-2 years Apple laptops will support eSATA?
My tip is to partition your main HDD into two partitions, one for the OS, the other for data. That way, when you reformat the C: drive and reinstall your OS, your data remains unaffected and you don’t need to waste time transferring files over USB or FireWire.
HOWTO: Never Lose Personal Data When Reinstalling Your OS
Well.. I have a first-gen Macbook with a 60 GB main drive… two partitions are not an option; if I so much as dual-boot Vista, I’m completely out of space.
I found a MyBook Pro Edition with Firewire 800 which I really wanted. BestBuy had them for $170 and they only had one in stock. I thought that was a good price. I have 2 older hard drive enclosures with only 150 GB in them. I went out and picked up 2 PATA drives 500 GB each to replace them. They were on sale at circuitcity for $109 so I went to BestBuy (going there anyway) and they gave me that sale price plus 10% off of the difference which is only $4 each. So I have 1.5 TB for $380.
I went with 500 GB because in my experience, the larger the drive the more time it takes to take care of them. When I have to do maintenance on a drive – the larger it is the longer it takes. On the other hand, I don’t want to have more outlets filled around here than I have to. this is good for now.
Also, the connections are very important. I think Macs or today’s hard drives don’t handle eSATA too well yet? Read MacWorld from May. It shows real world speeds with each connection type. USB 2 is slower than Firewire 800 but you can connect the USB up to an Airport Extreme and share the drive with another computer.
As for me. I’m a happy camper with my 1.5 TB.
I just recently picked up two external USB/Firewire (yes, both) Seagate Freeagent Pro’s at 500 gigs each for 149$ .. thats a terabyte for 300 bucks..
hell i remember when harddrives were 10$/meg. /end “back in my day” rant.
Wal-mart is selling a 500GB WD external drive for $149.98 both in my local store and on walmart.com. Not sure why you chose the more expensive Iomega drive to feature in your post :-)
Is it me or do the programs get larger as the price of drives goes down? I installed the adobe cs3 programs the other day and realized my dream of an ultra fast 128gig solid state drive just is not a reality as adobe took a quarter of my hard drive (25gigs). Soon I’ll need a terabyte just to be able to use after effects, and maya on the same machine.
Sean Fenney wrote:
“Wal-mart is selling a 500GB WD external drive for $149.98 both in my local store and on walmart.com. Not sure why you chose the more expensive Iomega drive to feature in your post”
The HD featured in the post is a *networked* drive. Plug it in to your router/switch and it is accessible from other computers on your network.
An external drive without the networking feature is always going to be cheaper at the moment.
“Do you have any storage tips?”
Yes, buy two and use the second one to back up the first.
As HD capacities increase, backing them up is a real challenge if you are using a significant portion of that HD, especially since other storage technologies are not keeping up with the size/price ratio (for example, writeable optical media is starting to look smaller and smaller in the case of writable DVD, or outrageously expensive as in writable HD-DVD/Blu-Ray).