1TB hard drives dipping below $100 retail for the first time

Sat, 10/18/2008 - 9:08pm — Seth Weintraub

Another milestone has been reached as hard drives keep getting bigger and bigger and cheaper and cheaper. The sub 10 cent Gigabyte era is upon us as a few retailers are selling 1TB hard drives for $100. Frequent 9to5mac.com advertisers, Other World Computing are offering Samsung Spinpoint P drives for $99.

Also Amazon is offering is offering a Seagate Barracuda for $100 (since raised back to $130). If you are a rebate kind of person you can get a 1Tb drive at NewEgg for $99 after $30 rebate.

1TB drives have been coming down in price more significantly since larger 1.5 TB drives have hit the market.

What makes SATA drives more interesting/fun is that you can use them like hot swapable disk drives if you get a USB docking station (like pictured). They have standardized power/interface port locations acoss all drives and manufacturers.

The first hard drive I ever bought was a 80 MB SCSI Hard drive which was just under $1000. Today, if someone gave me a 80 MB USB Key, I'd probably toss it.

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Comments

You must be young!

Sat, 10/18/2008 - 10:21pm — 9to5Mac Noob (not verified)

You must be young! I remember when a 5MB hard drive was as big as my washing machine. I remember when saving programs to cassette tape was unsuccessful at least 30% of the time.

But still, you make a great point!

Yeah!

Sat, 10/18/2008 - 10:48pm — Attk

Seemingly not too long ago, I remember paying $1,200 for a 1GB external SCSI drive... OK, 15 years ago, but still...

In the early 80's I saw an

Sun, 10/19/2008 - 11:04am — 9to5Mac Noob (not verified)

In the early 80's I saw an advertizement in a computer magazine for an internal 5 MB hard drive for around $2,000. (200 of them would equal 1 GB and cost you $200,000!) I wonder what it will cost in another 25 years.

do these things

Sun, 10/19/2008 - 11:22am — 33 (not verified)

do these things work on the mac? just plug and play? dont need drivers or anything?

ya, they're grrreeeat!

Sun, 10/19/2008 - 12:20pm — admin

ya, they're grrreeeat!

They've made great strides in

Sun, 10/19/2008 - 12:20pm — 9to5Mac Noob (not verified)

They've made great strides in drive capacity over the years, but why have disk speeds not increased at the same rate. I had a 7200 RPM drive in my Mac back in 1995.
Disk access and transfer speeds are by far the slowest component of modern computers and have been for years. I realize there are potential issues with heat and the necessity for more precision in manufacture, but it's not like they haven't overcome similar hurdles in the past. I personally can't wait for the next generation of larger, faster (and hopefully much more reliable) solid state drives.

Hard Drives

Sun, 10/19/2008 - 4:04pm — Mister Ron (not verified)

I still have, nicely repacked in the box, a 10 Megabyte external hard drive for the Apple IIe. It is bigger than my Mac Pro, and cost about $600 back in the eighties...Works, too! Got Byrd's Better Bye loaded into Prodos, so you can quit back to the Prodos prompt and catalog the entire drive.

-=-Ron-=-