[Robert57]

PC Mag. posted the following article reporting that Seagate is now shipping Barracuda 750 GB drives, exploiting the new "perpendicular" technology.   The internal drives are expected to retail at about $590, and the external version, strangely,  will be even less--$559.

Just one 750 GB drive could hold around 2200 CD's in FLAC or Apple Lossless--which would comfortably accommodate most music libraries in one tidy drive. At these prices, I'm tempted to delay buying a 4-disk RAID (such as the excellent Infrant Ready NAS X6 or NV) and instead just buy two of these Barracuda 750 drives (one as a B/U.) for my SB/ iTunes library. Maybe one could later move them over to a RAID set-up.

But this looks like a major leap in hard drive price/ performance. Made to order for home media servers!


http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1954146,00.asp

http://www.itnewsonline.com/showstory.php?storyid=3714&scatid=3&contid=3

[mgalusha]

Nice. MWave is showing them in stock for $499.

[Paul_Bui]

Thanks for spreading the good news.  It's about time for me to find a new HD capacity in addition to the existing 300GB HD, almost filled up with WAV files.

[ricmon]

750 gigs.  Start your defrag and go to work.  It'll take for ever to defrag that much disk.

[Rob Babcock]

My only concern would be reliability.  I generally like to buy HDs that are at least one generation/size removed from the top.  For instance, the reviews/ratings of the Seagate 7200.8's are a bit better than the 7200.9's, or so I've read.  Obviously that's why you have RAID, but losing a drive would really suck if you don't have RAID.

[Double Ugly]

750 gigs.  Start your defrag and go to work.  It'll take for ever to defrag that much disk.

I'm really pleased with Diskeeper in terms of efficiency (time) and quality.  Highly recommneded, and here's a review that helps explain why.  Much faster than XP's built-in defragger, and a much-have for today's enormous HDDs.

The only downside to Diskeeper is the the price, but then what's your data worth...especially after spending untold hours ripping your entire collection onto your drive(s)?

I also use SpinRite 6.0 from Gibson Research Corporation to keep my OS drive and stripped "data" array healthy.  This I give my highest recommendation, especially for those who don't back-up as often as they should (like me   )

Jim

[Paul_Bui]

Thanks Jim for recommending the Diskeeper.  I've downloaded a trial version and started defragmenting my HDs.  It's fast and seems more effective than the XP built-in software.

[Double Ugly]

Thanks Jim for recommending the Diskeeper.  I've downloaded a trial version and started defragmenting my HDs.  It's fast and seems more effective than the XP built-in software.

You're welcome, Paul.  I'm glad you like it.

[Eli]

But this looks like a major leap in hard drive price/ performance. Made to order for home media servers!

It may be a step forward in disk capacity, but it's certainly no bargain in dollars per gigabyte.  The largest drives available are never the best value.  Only if you need to maximize the amount of data that you can store in a given physical space do they make it worth paying that kind of premium.

Compared to a couple of smaller drives:

Code: [Select]


Adv Capacity    Actual Capacity      Price    $ per GB
------------    ---------------    -------    --------
      750 GB           698.5 GB       $499       $0.71
      500 GB           465.7 GB       $280       $0.60
      400 GB           372.5 GB       $180       $0.48
      320 GB           298.0 GB       $115       $0.39


[ooheadsoo]

This is only the beginning.  I'm impressed that the starting price is this low.  More space isn't the only advantage.