The best bang for the buck these days are the $99 750GB drives. That's 13.2¢ a GB, compared to 17¢ per GB for the quoted 1TB drive.

I got a couple of 500GB Seagate SATA II drives at Circuit City in February. They had a 5-year warranty. Barracuda drives. They were $99 each (back then) but now I'm seeing them for a little more.

Who makes the 750GB drives that you're talking about? (I see WD and Seagate have 750GB offerings but only the Seagate Barracuda has a five year warranty. I have used this once or twice and it handily beats a 1 or 3 year warranty for the same price!).

I bought 2 Seagate Barracudas ST3750640AS Serial ATA II 750GB 7200RPM 16MB bulk drives from etech4sale.com back on April 28th. At the same time I bought from them a 320GB 5yr Seagate PATA 7200RPM 8MB bulk for $86 [this to show relative price, I needed the IDE for a specific DVR application] Shipping was reasonable, UPS ground for the 3 drives and 2 keyboards cross country was only $22. And they shipped same day.

From my experience regardless of the cost per byte you are just better off getting the largest drive possible. I already have my rule, if it isn't a 1TB I don't buy it. That is for internal and external. I have too many 250gig and 300gig drives as it is. That take up too much space and hold very little video.

Amen to that.

WD Green Power disk for backup or storage of clip media, as they read fast but write slowly (and are quiet and don't produce heat).

Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB for speed (20-30% faster than 1 TB Seagate 7200.11 in Tom's Hardware comparisons) and quietness.

Still waiting for WD's high performance Black 3-platter 1TB drive...

What about the performance of current drives?

Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test (that tests with large blocks of data for large video files, not tiny bits that fit in the drive's cache) says:

WD 6400AKS 640GB $94.99 or less: 105.5 MB/s Read, 99.6 MB/s Write
Seagate 7200.10 320GB (cache size, for comparison only): 74.7 MB/s Read, 76.0 MB/s Write
WD WD10EACS 1TB Green Power $189.99 or less: 74.8 MB/s Read, 12.1 MB/s Write

I'll run the same benchmark on the Samsung 1 TB Spinpoint as soon as I receive it.

I agree. Less than a 1TB HDD is pointless. Additionally, a 5 year warrantee is useless if you get a new HDD in exchange for lost data.

With 1TB HDDs having been out for a long time and their prices having dropped below US$200, why is there nothing bigger yet?

"Less than a 1TB HDD is pointless. Additionally, a 5 year warrantee is useless if you get a new HDD in exchange for lost data"

A working hard drive in exchange for lost data is a lot better than Nothing in return for lost data. Experiencing lost data is painful enough without having to shell out again for another drive. After much pain with Maxtor in past years, I appreciate Seagate's 5 year warranty.

There are definitely places for smaller drives: (1) dedicated drives for operating systems & programs, (2) very high speed disks [typically expensive, and not available in gigantic sizes],especially for raid arrays of such high speed drives.

The fastest drives are 2.5", spin at 15,000rpm and don't hold much data. Enough of them in a 19" rack and you're really screaming along. The new VelociRaptors are kind of tempting but there seems to be an issue getting them working with some RAID controllers.

For general client's projects I'm sticking with nothing bigger than 300GB. That more than adequate for one project / clients data. I just have one drive / client. Labelled with a luggage tag tied onto the caddy's handle. My NAS box is another matter, I'm thinking it's time to upgrade it to 5x 1TB drives and / or add another one to the network, once I get my 1000BaseT dramas sorted, that's another story.

Bob.

....Still waiting for WD's high performance Black 3-platter 1TB drive...

I agree. That's the one that I want.

As long as we're talking about huge drives, there's something that's been puzzling me a lot lately.

Current standard drives are 3.5" x 1" high. However almost every drive bay in all but supercompact or rack mount PCs are 5.25" x 1.5". What i'm wondering is why we don't see more 5.25" drives with incredibly huge capacity. True, they might not be as fast as smaller drives, but for storing a ton of stuff they'd be very useful.

If the drive manufacturer didn't want to use 5.25"-sized platters and head arms then there's enough space in a 5.25" housing for two 3.5"-sized stacks. The extra half inch of height would allow 4 or 5 platters on each spindle. So, if we can fit 1TB on 2 platters now, we'd be able to put 5TB in a drive without any change in technology.

So, why isn't this being done?

Good question, guess you could ask the same thing about 8" drives.
I suspect the answer lies in rotational speed. The smaller the diameter of the platter the faster it can be spun. 3.5" is limited to 10K, 2.5" can run at 15K. The 2.5" drives can stack vertically across rack mount units and in RAID.

Also the lighter the head arm the faster it can be moved. So really I think making the drive smaller yields too many benefits for anyone to go back to 5.25" just for larger capacity. Even more to the point there's the reliability issue. 1x 4TB drive would worry me compared to 4x 1TB drives in RAID 5.

Bob.

With 1TB HDDs having been out for a long time and their prices having dropped below US$200, why is there nothing bigger yet?

I can't believe people are actually whining about this. What do you want, a 1 Petabyte drive for $399?

=]

What do you want, a 1 Petabyte drive for $399?

That would be a good start.

On the subject, I wonder how soon well see a Petabtye drive at the retail level?

The first 'affordable' 1GB drive was around $400, and it came out in 1996. Just a couple of years prior, you would've paid closer to $1500.

I still remember one morning when i was feeling antsy, got in the car, and just drove ... over some back roads i had never been on before ... for probably a couple hours. I eventually ended up in some town that i still don't know the name of and came across an OfficeMax. Looking around inside i saw they had 20GB (WOW!!!) WD drives on the shelf, normal price $360, marked down to $280, and an in store coupon for today only for another $50 off. I bought two of them, got back in my car, drove around another hour until i found a highway route number i recognized, and headed home.

I felt like i was a king of storage! Who could possibly need even 20GB, much less 40. Woooooooo.

Funny thing is i've gone through quite a few drives since then and a lot of them have died. Those two 20's are still going fine, just reformatted them a couple weeks ago and got 0 sector errors. I'm using them to build a P3 Win98SE machine to run some old graphics software i like that won't run properly under NT/XP.

Those two 20's are still going fine

That's because each bit on the disk is the size of a fist!

:O)

Nowadays the disk platters are so packed, the bits even have to stand up.

(Not a joke actually.)

I keep all my storage on Raid 5. Use seagate cause of the 5 year warranty. There have been a few more hiccups from seagate lately, but always keep extra 500 or 750 GB drives around. If drive hiccups, put new one in, keep working while rebuilding and get a replacement in 7-10 days if I don't prepay.

Also, when you are running 5-8 drive arrays, extra speed is nice......

Haven't lost any data since started using raid 5 about 5 years ago......

Not sure I'd go with the extra speed if they were 3 year warranty's, but might consider it if the speed were needed.

That's true Course. I'm more concerned about the reliability of the drive than I am the amount of storage.

I think you're going to hear a lot of grumbling down the road from those who simply looked the the most memory they could get at the cheapest price.

I have a pro photographer friend who refuses to use huge-capacity CompactFlash cards for her Canon cameras because she would never want to be in a situation where a single glitch would wipe out her entire photo shoot. Maybe one could make the argument for video files, too?