Some hard drive speculation

So I noticed the new 1.5TB WD is being listed on Scan now. And it's a pretty good price (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/15TB-...ATA-3Gb-s-32MB)

Once they become available, do we think the price of the 2TB drive will drop in response?

They use the same platter, the 1.5TB version just has 3 platters instead of 4. Taking the fixed cost of producing a drive into account as well as the number of platters, really the 2TB should only be about 20-25% more expensive than the 1.5TB. This makes it around £180 instead of the current £250.

Sounds reasonable? thoughts on the subject?

I reckon that any price drop would be quite minimal to be honest until we see other 2TB drives. They don't have exclusivity for the 1.5TB capacity, but they do for the 2GB capacity (largest in the industry). I reckon that prices are mostly reflected by the market rather than the cost of manufacturing.

Can't help thinking it's just wishful thinking - there's a complete lack of competition at the 2TB point, Western Digital have little reason to drop just yet.

I think a lot of the competition is brought from the different types of drives available as well - look at the 1TB mark and you've got the F1 for cheap desktops, the Black for high performance desktops, Green for power-saving, the RE2 and RE3 for servers - the more choice there is, the more prices they need to be spread across.

How long will it take to get enterprise 24x7 1.5TB and 2TB drives I wonder...

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Originally Posted by snootyjim

Can't help thinking it's just wishful thinking

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Yes, probably :)

The WD drive is still significantly more expensive than the 1.5TB Seagate, both of which are desktop drives.

If the 2TB drive price came down in line with the WD 1.5TB I'd be tempted to start buying some for my NAS boxes. As it stands I can save money by replacing my 5x 500GB and 5x 1TB drives with Seagate 1.5TB over just replacing the 5x 500GB with 2TB drives.

The Seagate was the only 1.5TB drive on the market for a long time, there wasn't a huge difference in price between it and the equivelant 1TB offering.

Unless all the manufacturers start offering 2TB drives or someone produces a drive larger than 2TB I can't see the prices dropping much if at all.

Funkstar, You must have some serious amounts of data with that set up you have. What NAS boxes do you use? and how are the drives set up ? RAID 5 ?

2x N5200Pro both in RAID5

I have lots of music and video content. Call it backups if you will, none of it is downloaded though :)

I also have a lot of HD content I would like to treat the same way, but that will take a lot more storage :)

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Originally Posted by Funkstar

2x N5200Pro both in RAID5

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They look great, If only I could convince myself it's worth spending almost a grand on one with some hard drives.:eek:

Planning on selling them at some point and moving to a custom built server with hardware RAID cards. but that will be after I move into my new place. Probably late summer.

They served their purpose well, I just want more flexability. And as im running a server anyway for MediaPortal and SqueezeCenter (official SqueezeCenter releases have their own module for the N5200, but not the Betas that i'm running), there seems little point in having the NAS boxes as well.

I'll also have the space for a full sized server when I move, currently the two smaller units fit just perfectly where I have them.

They sound fantastic! but, your new system plans sound better still.

How much storage capacity do you get running 5* 1TB disks in RAID 5 ?

EDIT: I just worked it out 3725GB.

yeah, that sounds about right, but probably a little less due to file system overheads etc

It is incredibly difficult to get decent RAID cards for a reasonable price though. Everything on eBay seems to be either 2 or three port or PCI-X, nothing good in PCI-e. And full price is silly money :(

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Originally Posted by Funkstar

The WD drive is still significantly more expensive than the 1.5TB Seagate, both of which are desktop drives.

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It probably doesn't matter much for a NAS, but I don't think that Seagate is getting the best reputation for their current (SATA) line up. I mean, even ignoring the 7200.11 fiasco, the performance of the 7200.12 is mixed despite being one of a relatively small number of 500GB/platter drives available.