Tech deals galore, but...

... it's not just because it's the post-Christmas sales. It's pre-CES inventory clearance. If it was expensive in 2008 and just became very cheap, it's liable to be imminently murdered by a replacement. Instead of being lured into another contract, wait another few weeks and the same thing might well be available unlocked at similar remainder-bin prices.

[#1 posted by OM , January 2, 2009 4:56 PM]

...And the fun thing that's going to happen, at least according to some of my old work buddies who still work at Dell, is that in the next six months we're going to be seeing Hard Drive prices drop drastically as manufacturers start pushing their lines away from platters'n'spindles and towards SSD. Expect 500GB to 750GB drives to be about 1/3 less what they are now, and 1TB to 1.5TB ones to be at least 20% to 25% cheaper as inventories are flushed. Expect similar price drops for the smaller and/or slower 4GB to 16GB SSD drives, but probably not untl the end of the year or early 2010.

...The smartest thing the manufacturers could do is what many of us storage hogs have wanted ever since IBM released the old full height "10 MB Bricks": the abilty to daisy-chain more than just two drives, but as many as we damn well want. You can do that with USB to some extent, but you've got the issues of all the cables snaking all over the place(*). I want something about twice as expandable as SCSI without the price gouging.

...In anticipation of a snarky comment - oh, hello Takuan! - as for *why* anyone would need such massive amounts of storage, I submit the latest revision of OM's Law #1, which states that no matter how much hard drive space you have, you'll always need about a CD's worth more than what's available.

(*) Of course, with a little "Romulan Engineering" you can mount as many drives as can fit in a case by feeding cables back inside through a backplane slot, but I'd rather have a solutiont that doesn't require a USB-EIDE 5V adapter for each drive.

[#2 posted by Lonin , January 2, 2009 5:23 PM]

I'm looking forward to $.05/GB.

[#3 posted by Drew Blood , January 3, 2009 7:21 AM]

@OM
Good news! As for storage I've personally moved almost exclusively to NAS. I use a DNS-323 from D-link which is a fantastic and really affordable little unit, and now that I've outgrown the 2 drives I have in it, I'm probably going to add a DNS-321 (almost identical but no USB printer port and quite a bit cheaper) and a couple 1TB drives. Love this cheap storage!

[#4 posted by wheezer , January 4, 2009 4:39 AM]

@OM

4-port SATA PCI cards are almost free as it is. Just get enough of those, a PSU and an enclosure of your choice, and you can stick as many HDDs in as you want. Couple that with FreeBSD/Solaris + ZFS, and you can create a small array with the disks you have today and grow it once those big HDD savings start coming in.