[rescue] WANTED: Older IDE/ATA/PATA 500gb drives

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 08:43:56AM -0400, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> The money is in the motor/electronics, not the media.

That changes. Once a newer better faster mechanism comes out, there is no 
real need to keep making the older ones. So they sell off what they have
and don't continue to make the smaller/slower drives.

> I recently went out to get two small SATA drive, just for OS installs,  
> and a 160 Gig drive was $55, a 1 TB drive was about $30 more on sale. I 
> went for the Terabyte...

Actually the 160gig drive may be a 500gig drive limited in some way. It could
be that something did not past a test at the higher density, but that's unlikely
because most drives are not tested anyway. 

The 160gig drives exist because people buy them based on price, not cost
per gig. If you are trying to sell a $200 computer, $5 matters.

Here you see them as package deals with an ATOM dual core, 1g RAM, 160G hard
drive, no optical drive and a motherboard with 1 PCI but no PCI/E slots. They 
have a fairly decent video chipset for a 19" LCD monitor, and are sold for 
$375 (including VAT) for the computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers.

A dual layer DVD burner is an "up sale" of about $30, but a lot of people
don't buy them. For a kid with a family internet connection, who uses USB 
memory sticks to move things back and forth, it's a decent computer. 


> The price difference at Target you describe has to do with more than  
> simple pricing-as you said, they are soaking the impulse buyer, one that 
> forgot the wanted one until they got to the checkout line.

Here they are more evenly priced, but I've never looked at the ones at the
supermarket. No only are they used instead of optical disks for moving files,
all the DVD players take them and even the $20 ones play "DIVX" files off of
them.

The digital TV tuners ($75 up) include a PVR function to the same sticks and
play a lot more formats than the DVD players.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM