Price Guides, March 2005: Storage
by Kristopher Kubicki on March 7, 2005 7:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Welcome back to another edition of the Price Guides. It’s been very long since we looked at any storage products on strictly a price basis, but now that next generation drives have picked up some availability, it’s about that time again. As another reminder, the RealTime Price Guides is leaving the beta testing phase, and moving into production real soon! Please send us your comments and suggestions on how we can improve our engine. Of course, you can always view the existing release of the engine here. Furthermore, you can view the still beta QuickSearch RSS feed forum thread here.
You might recall that we took our first look at the MaXLine III series back in June of last year and availability has been anything but consistent. There have been more NCQ drives on the market in the past couple of months, and of course, lots and lots of very big drives too. In mid-January, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 NCQ drives really started to hit the retail vendors in full force and since then, there have been some really excellent deals on performance Seagate drives.
All of those 16X DVD burners that were rushed out to market without any 16X write support have now been replaced by more capable 9 th generation drives. Pioneer and NEC both unleashed new revisions on their last burners, and the battle for 16X “round two” is all but over. We still have full details concerning this and previous generations of DVD burners in this week’s guide, but the choices are getting more and more obvious.
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Live - Wednesday, March 9, 2005 - link
I second Semo. Now that firewire 800 is coming strong external looks even more tempting.semo - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Kristopher, could you include external storage solutions in your brilliant price guides. there have been some really interesting options lately like the wd passport and lacie 300693... both are host powered mobile hdds but i don't know which one is better.MadAd - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
#8 No not really. The important thing is whether all drives are measured the same way. Its just a comparison.Auzner - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Wouldn't it make more sense to calculate $/GB by [$/(.93*GB)]? Because a 250gb isn't really a 250gb because of the 1000^3/1024^3 stuff.KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
MrEMan: The drives are listed as ATA100 - because quite frankly ATA133 is ATA100. ATA133 isn't *really* a spec. But I digress :-Pdev0lution: The graph generator is actually writing Feb01 - as in February first. I'll see if I can't tweak it in the future.
Kristopher
dev0lution - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Price graph's listing 2001 as the year in the dates?MrEMan - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
I notice that quite a few of the Maxtor PATA drives are listed as ATA 100, when in fact Maxtor is the only major manufacturer producing ATA 133 drives, which makes since they created the spec.MadAd - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
I noticed the price of the 250Gb 7200.8s drop in the UK too, I just picked up 4 for £346 delivered - STR benches upto 90MB/s on a TX4000 in raid 10- its like having a raptor with half a TB of space :)segagenesis - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Riplock = most of the modern drives will only let you read a movie at 2x on purpose to discourage ripping. There are firmware mods if you dont care about warranty to remove this (and enable RPC-1 if you have movies from other regions, like I do). On the ND-2500 I can get 12x rip at the end of the disc (or layer break) rather than maybe 3.6x.dragonballgtz - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
OK, what is riplock? :confused;