Still As Life

I came back up to Brisbane from Lismore this afternoon.

I've been watching the Eight Mile Plains Umart store over the past few days since it's just around the corner from my place, kind of. Anyway, I've been watching the online store because I noticed that the prices of hard drives seemed to have gotten quite cheap over the past couple of weeks with 500gb SATA2 Samsung and Western Digital hard drives at $129. Seagate are as usual a bit more expensive. 750gb drives are as cheap as $228 for Western Digital or $245 for Samsung drives.

Even 1tb drives are reaching a decent price with the cheapest at $370 for Western Digital, though 2x 500gb drives are still far better value than a single terrabyte drive. Of course, a terrabyte hard drive in a desktop PC does give one some bragging rights. Not many though.

Anyway, the 500gb hard drives from Samsung and Western Digital are what I was watching in particular. Of the two brands, Samsung are my preference as I have had nothing but good experiences with Samsung hard drives, and some bad experiences with Western Digital. Ideally, I would prefer Seagate, call me a fanboy, but if I could afford a Seagate everytime I was buying hard drives, it would be a Seagate. However, at the moment, the 500gb Seagate's are $56 more expensive at $185. Now, the Samsung drives have been out of stock for the past few days, so I was strongly considering putting in an order for a Western Digital drive, just as I was leaving Lismore though, I was having a look again just to make sure, and lo and behold, Samsung drives were back in stock!

So here I am at home, $129 out of pocket but with a shiny new 500gb SATA2 Samsung hard drive. Can you pick which one it is in the photo?

It was very tempting to buy a second one while I was at it and put them in RAID 0 to replace the current 2x 320gb drives in RAID 0 and rebuild them into a RAID 1 configuration for my server backups.

However, while it is only $129, $129 is still $129, especially when I haven't been working since before Christmas.

Can always pick up another one later anyway.

Labels: hardware