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Hard Drive Prices - Suggestions?

Border

Border

New Member
I know the prices are way up due to the factory flooding in Thailand. Just wondering if anyone has any suggestions where to get the best price right now on a couple of 500GB (or larger) sata drives. I am adding a pogoplug to my router for file storage/access/backup. etc.

Doing the Google search and not finding any magic bullet so far. Also wondering if and when prices are expected to come down at all?
 
choucove

choucove

New Member
Right now for me I have a hard time locating the best deals because I use only the highest quality and performance hard drives available, either the Western Digital Caviar Black series for desktops or Western Digitial Raid Edition 4 drives for servers. These are some of the most expensive SATA drives still.

Seagate prices have come down quite a bit now as their production has gotten back up and going faster than Western Digital has been able to recover. I would recommend looking at the Seagate Barracuda XT line as they have higher quality and longer warranty. Warranty period on a hard drive means a lot about its quality compared with others!

Some of the cheapest places to order hard drives are also some of the places with the most limited stock (such as CDW.) Likewise, some of the places that have available stock are also the most expensive (such as Newegg.) I've actually ordered a few drives through Amazon because they offered immediately available drives at a more affordable cost than anywhere else I usually go with.
 
Techman

Techman

New Member
The price of a hard drive is irrelevant.

As mentioned above..
The value is what we look at. Get a drive that is a known long term performer and will last the long term. Pay the price and get on with it. Over the long term we are talking pennies of differences in the drive price.

Just get the cheapest drive out there with a short life span and see how much time it takes to get back up and running after a failure. Now we know the real costs of those drives. Yes, cheap drives have a very short warranty while higher priced drives have very long warranties. That should say something about the value.

Get a long term drive at any cost and after it runs day after day for years without a hitch and see how much it is appreciated.. Then compare the total cost of the drive plus the cost of replacing it plus the down time then see who is crying about how much to pay for a drive.

For example. I use a Point of Sale XP machine 40 gig hard drive sitting under the desk operating daily since 2002. Amortize that over 10 years and see how much that drive actually cost.
 
T

Tigertron

New Member
Frys and microcenter have good prices. I flip flop between Segate and WD. I am avoiding Hitachi now due to 2 out of 3 failures on them. Recently I added capacity to my NAS and found it cheaper to buy external drives and rip the guts out. I used one left over case to make an external DVD drive from a SATA DVD I had spare.

All drives will fail eventually so always back up. Most warranties are the same unless you are spending big bux for server grade but that is unnecessary for most folks. I suggest setting up a 1TB RAID5 and autoback up to that on your network. Then as drives pop just replace them.
 
choucove

choucove

New Member
One thing this kind of brings up in regards to RAID as well is if you are putting together a server/NAS and plan on doing a RAID array, you may plan on just purchasing one additional hard drive than originally intended so you have a hot spare backup in the case of a failure. While you might not need it for three or four years, if you have a drive that finally goes down, you might have a difficult time then finding that exact same model of hard drive to allow you to plug it back in and rebuild the array properly. Plus, this eliminates the waiting time for a drive to ship in.
 
Rooster

Rooster

New Member
I've found tiger direct to have decent prices on drives since the factory flooded.

Frankly the only thing I'll be using traditional hard drives for is long term backup. SSD drives are so much faster with no moving parts to fail that it only makes sense to use them for the heavy lifting and back up the data often to a regular old hard drive that won't be seeing the same amount of use as the main drive does.
 
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