# The drop in hard drive prices...



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Just for S&Gs, check out this link for Disk Drive Prices (1955-2004). In 1955, a 12MB hard drive would set you back $74,800. Now, I'm looking at a replacement 100GB hard drive for my notebook computer with 16MB cache for $157.


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## Bogy (Mar 23, 2002)

First hd in the early 90s, 30 meg, $280
hd in mid 90s, 340 meg, $280
hd in late 90s, 540 meg, $180
hd around 2000, 2.1 gig, $150
20 gig, 40 gig, 80 gig hds since then, from $120 to $80, price dropping as size grew larger.
Last year I bought computers with 225 gig hds, I have not had to buy replacements yet, but the size keeps going up, and the price per meg/gig keeps dropping.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Just bought another 200G Maxtor at Staples for $59 after coupons. Instant $20 rebate plus a $30 coupon. Staples has some fairly good paying "spam" They send me a nice coupon with every piece of spam. Now if I could just get that kind of income from all spam I receive. 

Hard drives are now cheaper than video tape for my video storage. Plus I get to save all the project files in one place. I'm finding that one in 5 TV shows I do require I go back in 6 months later and make some adjustments and saving all the project files in one place makes it an added cost bonus. Yes, for me, hard drives have become a real profit center. I have 56 200 G drives in my archives from the past 18 months when it became cost effective to do that. 

Another useful tool I have is a USB2.0 to IDE cable adapter and a small wallwart IDE drive power supply. These are better than the external drive enclosures for fast drive swapping. The cable and power supply costs $15.


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## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

> Another useful tool I have is a USB2.0 to IDE cable adapter and a small wallwart IDE drive power supply. These are better than the external drive enclosures for fast drive swapping. The cable and power supply costs $15.


 Where do you find these? Not that I need more warts on my walls, but they sound handy.


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## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

By the way, I can recall replacing my first hard drive when it died. It was a 20 Meg and cost something like $649 or $699 installed. This was for an old 80186 machine, my first PC.


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## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

> Hard drives are now cheaper than video tape for my video storage. Plus I get to save all the project files in one place.


I assume that this is what most audio studios are doing now also, and probably have been for quite some time. I got out when real (authentic vs. reel :lol: ) tape was still used.


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## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Richard King said:


> Where do you find these? Not that I need more warts on my walls, but they sound handy.


I would try NewEgg. I would like to have one of these puppys in my repair bag for data recovery. It is also double-ended for both notebook and regular hard drives.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Mark- That's it! Different brand name than I use but essentially the same thing.

Just a few notes-
The drivers disk is for non- XP OS so if you have XP you won't need the disk, just plug n play. I bought mine at a computer flea market "Market Pro" A bit cheaper there than your reference but still much cheaper than the ext. cases and certainly far more compact. One downside- I have found that sometimes you need to refresh the USB connection on a reboot of the computer. I have 3 of these connected along with 4 ADS cases and the cases never lose connection with a reboot of the computer while the cable device averages needing a simple reconnect to refresh every 3rd reboot.


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## David_Levin (Apr 22, 2002)

Richard King said:


> Where do you find these? Not that I need more warts on my walls, but they sound handy.


Here's $12.50. I once bought one of these just for the +5/+12 power supply.

Note that the price will vary a bit. This place does a daily special and the USB<->IDE is almost always on it.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=USB2IDE-N

Here's the sales page:
http://www.geeks.com/sales.asp


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

David- That's the exact same model I've been buying.


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## Danny R (Jul 5, 2002)

I recently built a computer with 12 hard drives each having 400 gb of data setup in a raid array with one of them used as a hot spare. I think we got just under 4 terabytes of usable storage once setup was finished, and the security of knowing the data was safe if a single drive failed. Price for the whole setup was about $3000.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Danny- Educate me. The raid array... If one drive in the array fails, does it take the entire system down? 

I ask because this is an area I have not studied. BUT, I now have one computer here with 2- 200G drives for the C Drive in a Raid SATA system. Total 400G. I'm not sure how to deal with this in backup. What will happen if one of the two drives fails? The salesman told me to connect a D Drive IDE to the system, I would need to install a PCI IDE bus card in one of the 2 PCI slots. He said I could do that and set up a 400G IDE drive to keep nightly backups. Is this the best way to do this? Seems there should be another way. 

I currently do this nightly backup to a second hard drive on all my mission critical computers here, but those are low cost 100G backup drives. The raid SATA is considerably more expensive. Isn't there a way to do drive mirroring with Raid? I'm probably at a point where I may need to hire a hardware consultant to advise me.


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## olgeezer (Dec 5, 2003)

Explaining computers to a customer in 1990-- "This unit has a 640k hard drive--thats the equivalent of about a thousand printed pages"


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## Bogy (Mar 23, 2002)

I have an external case that I use to swap hard drives. The cover seldom is used, because it keeps the drive cooler with it off. I believe I paid about $30 for the case at CompUSA. I use the bottom of the case, with the connections, ever since I was upgrading my mom's computer to a larger hd, with the old drive on the desktop. Something dropped on the circuit board on the "bottom" of the drive and shorted it out.


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## CCarncross (Jul 19, 2005)

Richard King said:


> By the way, I can recall replacing my first hard drive when it died. It was a 20 Meg and cost something like $649 or $699 installed. This was for an old 80186 machine, my first PC.


80186? I hope you meant 8086 (original PC), or 8088(original PC XT)...

Yes, I'm an older poster too...I had one


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## Danny R (Jul 5, 2002)

_Danny- Educate me. The raid array... If one drive in the array fails, does it take the entire system down? _

It depends on the type of array. Raid comes in many different styles. The only thing in common is that data is shared across many drives.

_I ask because this is an area I have not studied. BUT, I now have one computer here with 2- 200G drives for the C Drive in a Raid SATA system. Total 400G._

This is probably a RAID-0 array, where there is no redundancy of data. Half the information is saved on one drive and half on the other and both drives are basically combined to form one really large one. The purpose of using this RAID format is generally to improve speed, but it offers no protection against data loss. If one drive fails here, all the data is still lost, just as if it were a single drive.

_He said I could do that and set up a 400G IDE drive to keep nightly backups. Is this the best way to do this? Seems there should be another way. _

Yup, basically to back up that drive you'd need something of equal size to do it. Probably the current drives are using the remaining IDE ports on the motherboard, which is why you'd need an extra one to add a drive.

In my department we use networked backup. Put a client on the computer, and each night the backup server connects to it and grabs all the changed information since the last backup. This is actually what I built the large server above for, as it holds all the data from about 200 computers spread across our department.

_Isn't there a way to do drive mirroring with Raid?_

Drive mirroring is RAID-1. Basically you have two drives (or virtual drives, as you can combine mirroring with other arrays), and all information copied on one is also copied on the other. Thus if one drive fails, the other still has all the info.

The array I used in my above computer was RAID-5. Basically its like RAID-0 in that info is copied across all the drives, but parity information is added as well. Thus if one drive fails, the hot spare kicks in and is immediately reconstructed with the information from the bad drive. You can continue reading and writing data even while this happens, but speed will be cut way down. Your only danger point is during the couple of hours this takes to happen, as if you lose another drive during that point you've lost the whole array, but generally the odds are low that would happen.

You can read more about all this here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_Array_of_Independent_Disks


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## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

CCarncross said:


> 80186? I hope you meant 8086 (original PC), or 8088(original PC XT)...
> 
> Yes, I'm an older poster too...I had one


Nope, it was an 80186, a somewhat rare CPU that was for some reason often used for PC's in industrial control systems. They are (or were) out there, but not common.


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## ntexasdude (Jan 23, 2005)

Your motherboard has to have RAID support. Some do and some don't.


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## Geronimo (Mar 23, 2002)

CCarncross said:


> 80186? I hope you meant 8086 (original PC), or 8088(original PC XT)...
> 
> Yes, I'm an older poster too...I had one


he is right there were 80186 processors. BTW the original PC was an 8088 not an 8086.


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## Danny R (Jul 5, 2002)

_Your motherboard has to have RAID support. Some do and some don't. _

You don't need the motherboard to support RAID if you use a dedicated RAID controller card. This is often the better choice for higher end arrays anyway, as most motherboard controllers usually only support RAID 0 or 1.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Danny- Thanks for your exellent summary. Looks like I should be looking into a Raid 1 system for my main office computer that does most of my daily stuff. I'll do some reading on it.


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## ntexasdude (Jan 23, 2005)

Danny R said:


> _Your motherboard has to have RAID support. Some do and some don't. _
> 
> You don't need the motherboard to support RAID if you use a dedicated RAID controller card. This is often the better choice for higher end arrays anyway, as most motherboard controllers usually only support RAID 0 or 1.


Yeah, I hadn't thought about a card. Would that be a PCI card? I suppose they would have one for the new PCIx bus?

I believe my Soyo motherboard is 0 or 1 and 0 +1.


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## cdru (Dec 4, 2003)

ntexasdude said:


> Yeah, I hadn't thought about a card. Would that be a PCI card? I suppose they would have one for the new PCIx bus?


Yes it can be a PCI card. There are also PCIx RAID cards available as well.


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