Hard drive prices - and innovation - decline

As the market stabilises we may well see a situation like that in the retail PC market a while ago, the price stays at a set level and the spec changes

My situation is that I don't know what HDD I may get from a client, so have to be able to read IDE as well as SATA, I don't have IDE on my main system so have to drag out an old system to mount the older drives - The fact that the dock I showed has an e-Sata is also a bonus a cheap card in my systems will speed up transfers over the current USB

I have eSata ports on the front top of the case here but not that type of enclosure that will take both types of drive. In fact I gave one of the same out as a gift to someone since his drives tend to fail more in order to at least be able to grab files from a drive ide or sata that will end up being tossed. Running right off of the board controllers of course would be preferred if the enclosure was only being used for just one pc however.

The external here is used for laptops as well as desktops which rules that out unless the enclosure provides both usb and eSata. The fan cooling was another thing this one offered however while the delay by usb hasn't been that noticable despite being a Green Power model.

In fact on the old Vista case used for XP, Vista, and the preretail 7 builds the main drive finally wore and was replaced in January. The new drive just put in now barely runs XP on it? When trying to get a clean install back on neither optical or flash key seemed to work with Vista but my friend was able to get XP on the old Sata II 500gb there. The new drive had seen a working restoration of an image to it from the previous and seemed to be running fine until it would no longer boot.

Now to grab another larger 1tb drive I can't say it will be this or that price in a day's time. Like you were saying the pricing stability seems to be off as well as vendors tending to mark the prices up a little when running low on inventory as well! When just looking the number of WD drives for example was low and the same drive I have went up not down in price?

Britton30 said:

Perhaps in the very near future we'll see SSDs with SLC nand in terabyte sizes becoming very affordable.

Peter, RAM prices here seem to be steady or slightly falling. I saw a 16GB, 2x8GB, 1866 kit today for $114.

32GB packages, like the G-Skill 2400-GXL have risen from $299 to as much as $359 from suppliers around me.

I was considering replacing all of my 7 x 2TB drives in my server, with 7 x 3TB drives. A year ago the 3TB drives (ST3000DM001) were $198. Now they are $133.

My OS on that one runs off a 120g Samsung SSD. Cut my boot time down from almost 5 minutes to just over 30 seconds.

The larger the kit, the more expensive. this is due to all the RAM chips having to be matched in performance, which is difficult. A 32GB kit may have 16 chips per module for a total of 128 for a 4x8GB kit.

The larger the kit the more dimms are to be found! You can order one dimm separated in some cases or two or four but never 3 or 5 in any kit form since dimms are matched.

The larger kit allows you to max things out from the start instead of adding a second kit in later. That can either help which it does most of the time or hurt since all dimms are from the same manufacturer's batch. The good part would be not running into any mismatch between two kits by the same or other brand.

The bad side however is when running into a bad batch you can end up with more then one bad dimm! That generally isn't the case but can still happen.

Sometimes when in doubt it's simply easier to use an online Conversion Calculator to find an exact answer when needed. Of course even any result there will differ from the actual drive space available per size of the drive in question. That's when you will need something like a Hard Drive Capacity Calculator

Save the links since those can come in real handy at times when you want to find something out without trying to do all the math.

With the newer larger capacity drives you will notice the Green Power disignation on select models for each make. These were introduced when first seeing drives sold in separate usb/eSata self powered enclosures which often brought in another problem with temps. The self contained enclosures hardly see only one vent and no air flow!

One of the reasons why the docking station idea can work out is there is no encasing around the drives themselve when simply plugging them in. The best alternative however is the fan cooled enclosures that accept both ide and sata drives alike for working with new as well as older drives.

With the larger capacities and ATA standards being maxed out or close to it! jimbo45 you know as well as I do that many will still opt to run multiple smaller capacity storage as well as OS drives to keep things at the more basic levels when not running SSDs or when keeping the larger drives for storage and backup while using the SSD for the OS.

Besides fan cooling one other option that can work on the larger cases not ones where space is confined relying on air flow only are the HD liquid coolers sold separately. But those have to be used in the 5 1/4" bays limiting the number of drives depending on type of case. Want an Antec 1200 full tower or large ThermalTake full tower to still see one or two optical with HD coolers in use and then try moving the steel case around? Better get a fork truck!

Just moving the 900-2 mid tower around can be weight enough without them while the case allows for a half dozen 5 1/4" bay use over simply seeing two 3 1/2" slide out drive bays.