Just bought a new 250 GB WD drive. What's the best price for 'em?

[NightWolve]

So, I went down to my local BestBuy and noticed a 250 GB/7200 RPM/8 MB CACHE hard drive on sale for $79.99. The 2nd drive on my PC system was just about to die, but I was able to salvage just about everything that was non-recoverable/replacable. The Win98 partition had already been damaged and could no longer boot. Fortunately, when I turned the PC off for a few minutes, and restarted, the noise the drive was making stopped and it began to work again allowing me to copy off my important files.

Anyway, so $79.99 x 1.0875 = $87 bucks for 250 GB. Good deal? I'm usually pretty lazy about these things even though I know I can probably hunt for a better deal on the net. If I see it on the shelf at the store, I'm more inclined to get it that way if the deal is fairly good enough. In this case, the sale was like a 70 dollar instant rebate from their regular marked up price. Anyhow, I like Western Digital myself and this seemed reasonable, so I decided what the hell. I need a backup drive now that my other one died and I'm at a critical stage with all my legacy, projects, etc. so if my main drive died, my life would be over. Heh. (I don't have a DVD burner for making backups either...)

[esteban666]

So, I went down to my local BestBuy and noticed a 250 GB/7200 RPM/8 MB CACHE hard drive on sale for $79.99. The 2nd drive on my PC system was just about to die, but I was able to salvage just about everything that was non-recoverable/replacable. The Win98 partition had already been damaged and could no longer boot. Fortunately, when I turned the PC off for a few minutes, and restarted, the noise the drive was making stopped and it began to work again allowing me to copy off my important files.

Anyway, so $79.99 x 1.0875 = $87 bucks for 250 GB. Good deal? I'm usually pretty lazy about these things even though I know I can probably hunt for a better deal on the net. If I see it on the shelf at the store, I'm more inclined to get it that way if the deal is fairly good enough. In this case, the sale was like a 70 dollar instant rebate from their regular marked up price. Anyhow, I like Western Digital myself and this seemed reasonable, so I decided what the hell. I need a backup drive now that my other one died and I'm at a critical stage with all my legacy, projects, etc. so if my main drive died, my life would be over. Heh. (I don't have a DVD burner for making backups either...)

Well, I actually have not priced drives for quite some time (2+ years), but it certainly sounds like a kick-ass deal. 250 GB? Goddam! I bought an external HD for $150+ 2+ years ago for a whopping 80GB and I thought that was absolutely huge!

TANGENT:
Not to go off on a tangent, but the hub of my home network is actually a Dell Pentium II circa 1998! I mention this because you are still running Win 98, as I am, on our old desktops. I remember when my wife and I bought this computer, because maybe 6-8 months later, the first Pentium III's were released.

Anyway, I actually still use "Oldie" for basic stuff. The CRT monitor is -- no joke -- like 60 lbs. OK, I don't know how heavy it is, but it is definitely one of the heaviest monitors I've ever encountered.

When friends and relatives want to use a computer, my wife and I never even mention our laptops. We simply bring them to Oldie.
END TANGENT.

[Seldane]

80 dollars sounds like a pretty good deal. 250GB drives seem to cost about 100 dollars here, if not more (200 GB drives cost like 10 dollars less). 300GB drives are usually super expensive though, about twice the price of a 250GB drive, seriously!

[NightWolve]

TANGENT:
Not to go off on a tangent, but the hub of my home network is actually a Dell Pentium II circa 1998! I mention this because you are still running Win 98, as I am, on our old desktops. I remember when my wife and I bought this computer, because maybe 6-8 months later, the first Pentium III's were released.

Well, I'm running Win 98 SE, ME, NT 4.0 Workstation, XP Professional and soon there'll be a 2000 Professional partition as well. I just got done restoring the 98 partition and a ME one on the new drive. Anyhow, my main partition that I do all my work and activity on is XP. The rest are for testing basically and I can like sometimes use the 2K partition to fix problems when XP screws up, so it's all good for backup purposes. Other than that, at least one 98/ME partition is good for old games that don't work well with the NT core.

[Dave Shadoff]

That sounds like a great price to me.

However, I would be careful with external drives - especially if they are formatted with NTFS.  I'm not sure why they fail, but they fail a whole helluva lot sooner than internals.  It is probably something about the enclosure's USB-to-ATA controller, rather than the drive itself.

Between myself and a friend of mine, we have owned about 8 external drives of various makes over the past 5 years (not including do-it-yourself enclosure kits), and the only ones still working are:
- my oldest, circa 2001, FAT-32
- his newest (2 units), less than 6 months old, NTFS but net-mounted.
Average lifetime before failure: 2 years.
Shortest in-use lifetime before failure: 2 months.

This is not to say that you won't get a couple of excellent years of use out of it, but be extra specially careful to ensure that it is used as a backup drive, or that it is backed up horrendously regularly.

[NightWolve]

However, I would be careful with external drives - especially if they are formatted with NTFS.  I'm not sure why they fail, but they fail a whole helluva lot sooner than internals.  It is probably something about the enclosure's USB-to-ATA controller, rather than the drive itself.

Yeah, I agree. I bought an 80 GB external firewire drive a few years back. It had a Western Digital drive inside but the enclosure/circuitry was made in China. It broke in about a year or so. Later I learned there's a way to start it up even in its damaged condition after warming it up for about an hour, etc., but that came at the cost of breaking the [IDE] hard drive. Initially, I thought the hard drive itself went bad. Unfortunately, had I removed and connected it internally to my PC, I would've seen that it was fine and that I could save all the files I had on it. Instead, since I figured it was garbage, I opened it up.... The End. Heh =\

I do have a theory on what caused the firewire case to break, though. I had enabled the power saving feature in Windows to spin down all hard drives when not used for say 20 minutes, etc. When it first broke, it was powered down by that feature, and refused to spin the drive back up when I tried to use it. Anyway, thought I'd share that. I'm still a little sore about $300 USD going down the tubes like that...

[esteban666]

OK, point taken. I thought my external harddrive was a very good solution, but now I am questioning that assessment. I know I have a bunch of files on the HD that haven't been properly archived yet (on CD)... I'd be upset if I lost them.