[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

prices continue to drop ...Fry's has a WD 1.5 Gig 7200 rpm on sale for < $100.

And so does Newegg:

Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EARS 1.5TB 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive - $99.99 Free Shipping*

Word of warning....****

If you're using XP, you will need to do some additional work to make this drive perform correctly. This line of Western Digital drives is the first using their new "Advanced Format," which changes the sector size from 512B to 4KB. The more modern operating systems work fine with this, but Windows XP will not align the sectors correctly.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[rwfromkansas]

I haven’t got a new external HD in a year or so. This is amazing.

[dayglored]

> The more modern operating systems work fine with this, but Windows XP will not align the sectors correctly.

There are reports of severe performance degradation in XP, due to misalignment, read/modify/write operations causing missed revolutions of the platter, etc.

I'm running Win7 on my hardware Windows boxes now, but if I were still running XP (other than VMs) I wouldn't use these >2GB drives for anything but archive storage.

[downwdims]

They are working on the firmware upgrades to deal with boot drives >2TB.

Imo Spend the extra cash and buy an SSD for your boot drive. It’s the best upgrade i’ve ever done on a machine. Literally boot to usable in 30 seconds. Everything is so Snappy! Srsly I’ve spent 500 dollars on a video card and the $230 I spent on the SSD improved overall system performance WAAAY more drastically.

Boot is an 80GB Intel x-25M. Then I have 2 640 gig WD cav blues. One is Data, the other is Backup. Win 7 AMD P2BE 3Ghz

[apillar]

Heck, I remember when I got my first hard drive installed in an old 286 8Mhz system that I had bought back in the late 80’s. It did not come standard and had to be purchased separately and was about $600 extra. It held a whopping 40MB (of course that was more than enough for anything you needed back then).

[kevkrom]

That’s great and all, but I’m pretty much done with platter drives, regardless of size. I’m far more interested in seeing the capacity of solid-state drives increase and the price come down to more consumer-friendly levels.

[Jack Wilson]

I can fill anything they can throw at me!

[abb]

Not to worry. Microsoft will have a new Office Suite out in no time to sop up the space like biscuits sop up gravy.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

2TB Seagate Constellation ES in for review

Homepage:

[VOA]

“
Hard Drives to reach 3TB in 2010?
“

Egad, I remember NOT THAT MANY years ago when my tech-cousin and
I would marvel at the falling price of hard drive storage.

We just about freaked out when you could finally get a 1 GB drive
for $1000.

[VeniVidiVici]

I really like the Caviar Green 1TB (64MB cache, 5400RPM) drives. They seem to run much, much cooler and the speed in a small raid 0 is phenomenal.

When SSD comes down again I plan on getting one to use for my boot drive.