Price Guides October 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage

Hard Drives: Parallel ATA

On a cost-per-gigabyte basis, hard drives are cheaper today than they have been in some time. If you can find the right deal, HDD storage capacity can be had for 50 cents per gigabyte or even less. If you are turning to the web for the holy grail of hard drive deals, then Seagate's ATA 100160GB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive is a great choice for anyone with a lot of files that need to be stored. Seagate is currently known for their 5-year warranties while most other HDD manufacturers are only offering one to three years of warranty coverage on new drives. There's not too much to say about this Seagate product, but what little there is to say is obviously positive. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the larger the drive, the harder it will fall. This is yet another case where putting RAID, or some other kind of backup procedure, into place is a good idea. Many can remember losing gigs of data due to nothing more than a malfunctioning hard drive. Many more wish that they had had backups when it happened.

With storage prices relatively low and with the growing adoption of DVD burners, there really isn't a reason any more to not have your critical data backed up safely.