Price Guides February 2004: Magnetic and Optical Storage
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 25, 2004 4:19 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Recently leaked memos from Maximum PC have been the cause of debate for the last few weeks. Sheller has the unabridged article here for your reading pleasure. Obviously, this has caused an unfriendly stir in the storage community. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the situation, there basically have been some unusual memos leaked from IBM that claim IBM insiders knew of problems with Deskstar hard drives, but decided to cover it up with marketing. This does not only look bad on IBM, but the whole storage community.
This comes right on the heels of Fujitsu's $43M settlement where it was discovered Fujitsu drives manufactured between 2000 and 2001 were built with faulty controller chips. Read more here.
Fortunately, even though the IDE market has been fairly tainted with scandal and lawsuits, the drives produced today are quite good. If you are looking for a stable, inexpensive drive primarily for additional storage, there are a lot of good IDE solutions. Our particular favorite this week is the 160GB Western Digital with 2MB buffer. Several sources have indicated the 2MB edition does not cripple the drives nearly as much as WD or Maxtor would like us to believe. For $100, you cant go wrong.
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KristopherKubicki - Sunday, February 29, 2004 - link
MadAd i will look into adding this.Kristopher
MadAd - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
I think a column indicating price per gigabyte would be helpful addition to the magnetic storage chart, giving your table an 'at a glance' sweet spot record of the price data already listed.artifex - Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - link
It'd be really nice to have the +-R(W) status of each item on the DVDR list, without having to click on the individual names.Also, you might point out that drives are one of the few areas where it may pay to shop locally, as stores like Fry's and Best Buy and others frequently carry rebates for Maxtor, Western Digital, and now Hitachi (Deathstars, anyone?).
Last year I was typically getting my 160GB 8MB Maxtor IDE drives for around $80-90 after rebate, and this year so far I've bought a 180GB Deathstar for what should be around $70, assuming the rebate ever comes...
LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - link
Just a note to folks looking into the DVD drive market...I recently bought the NEC 2500A listed, from NewEgg. If you're a newbie, you might find its lack of documentation and bundled software a problem, but for everyone else, an 8x -R /8x +R DVD burner is a steal at that price. I have yet to burn a coaster, or a disc that I couldn't read in a decent DVD player or drive. And, it's whisper quiet. I'm a happy camper.KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - link
oops... fixed :-pPrinceGaz - Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - link
On page 1 "...Matrox recently disclosed its unbridged SATA drives at IDF"Unless Matrox really have expanded from the graphics-card market, I think that should be Maxtor :)