Has there ever been a better time to buy Hardware?

[NoPrisoners]

Its not a great time right now, RMAed my Corsair PSU and was looking at the prices now and its ~£20 more expensive than it was last septmeber!

[arthurleung]

I was looking at the price of cases and PSUs, the price was so high it completely put me off.
I ended up just buying a Shuttle.

Consider a decent mobo -> £80+, decent PSU -> £60, decent case £80+, basic heatsink -> £20, a Shuttle is a bargin at £220.

[Hottentot]

Its a good time to buy graphics cards now that AMD and Nvidia are slugging it out on cost, everything else seems to be about the same price as last year or a little more expensive. The main item dropping in price is the SSDs, but even with the drops the are stupidly exspensive. Still want one though.

[arthurleung]

Its a good time to buy graphics cards now that AMD and Nvidia are slugging it out on cost, everything else seems to be about the same price as last year or a little more expensive. The main item dropping in price is the SSDs, but even with the drops the are stupidly exspensive. Still want one though.

IMO, Ideally people will have a three-tier or four-tier storage. Which I have just tested and worked well on one of my friend's server.

Tier 1 -> SSD for OS, About 32GB in size, Mainly for read access
Tier 2 -> 10K/15K Drive for anything that do a lot of random writes (More extreme case is database like MySQL)
Tier 3 -> 7.2K Drive(s) for low importance files that need relatively large amount of space that the 10K/15K could not provide
Tier 4 -> 5.4K Drives in RAID5/6 for archive.

For consumer usage though, Tier 1+3 or 3+4 would be enough. Put files according to usage pattern into the 4 Tiers for minimum cost and maximum efficiency.

[Funkstar]

I'll go for the lot 1, (2), 3 and 4

I put 2 in brackets as i'm planning on using a RAM disk for some stuff as well on my server

[peterb]

I'd regard tier 4 as for important files that need to have online access and add Tier 5 (tape or similar) for archive storage, system recovery etc.

[arthurleung]

I'd regard tier 4 as for important files that need to have online access and add Tier 5 (tape or similar) for archive storage, system recovery etc.

Now only if tapes are cheap enough. You'll be in a world of pain trying to backup something like 8x1.5TB RAID5/6 (Not that uncommon, a lot of people I know run something like this). Take a cheap old-gen LTO-1 you'll need 90 tapes, for double redunduncy you'll be looking at 180. You'll probably hire someone 5-days-a-week if you want to backup to BD or DVDR Impossible to do it yourself.

Just get two of the same system and have the same Tier 4 on the 2nd machine acting as an "offline" backup.

We somehow got to the Age where the only way to backup is by harddrives. Neither USB, Firewire, GbE is fast enough for full-blown 8+ TB Disks backup. And removable storage is too small the thought of backing up will put you off

I predict in 3-4 years people will either jump to SSD (Typical consumers, who rarely need anything more than 200GB) and the rest (Who need more than SSD can provide but don't have the money) will go for RAID1/5/6 exclusively. Single Multi-TB drive itself is way too dangerous to run on its own .

[peterb]

LTO4 stores up to 1.6Tb with hardware compression, and LTO5 and 6 (not yet in production) may offer greater capacity again. An LTO4 tape can be bought for around £35 or less. (The crippler is the initial outlay for the drive - but then offset that against the amount you would be prepared to pay a specialist data recovery company to recover that data. As for RAID (of whatever sort) - it isn't a substitute for backing up.

[arthurleung]

Yes tape is a good investment, as current UK harddrive price which is over-inflated compared to everywhere else in the world even taking into account of the poor exchange rate.

Most likely the tape drives have been in storage for a year or two which makes them perfect to buy NOW

Though it is useless to talk about compression on tape as you can also apply compression on files on harddrive. So the compressed capacity is only on paper.

Just did a comparison on tape price and it was about the same price per GB for USA and Asia. You still have to pay for the tape drive though. Cost of further redundancy and maintenance is about the same too.

[peterb]

<----snip

Though it is useless to talk about compression on tape as you can also apply compression on files on harddrive. So the compressed capacity is only on paper.

snip---->

Not quite - tape drives use hardware based compression which is slightly more erfficient (and is tailored to the tape medium), but I'd agree that if you are storing a zipped (or rar or any other software compressed file format) you won't get a 2:1 improvement! )

[badass]

For real world figures, my company gets about 520GB on an LTO3 tape with compression. That's pretty normal.
However, for companies that have 5 plus TB to back up, they can buy LTO4 libraries for about £5k that can take 24 Tapes or a 48 tape one for about £6K
The libraries I'm thinking of can take 2 or 4 drives so provided your backup software is licenced for it, you can use the throughput of aall drives at once.
It's quite common these days for backups to be disk to disk to tape to reduce the backup window as disks are still much faster (even than LTO4 that can do up to 160MB/sec)

[Aden]

I don't really agree - PSU and case prices are way up compared to where they were a year ago. .

Agreed - Power supplies seem to be extremely expensive at the moment and with the rest of the components cheap, you may end up buying powerful components that need a damn expensive PSU.

[Bugbait]

To answer the original question, yes, there has been a better time to buy PC hardware. Since most PC products are based on the USD, when the exchange rate was 2:1 in favour of the GBP, that was the best time to buy. My monitor is currently &#163;100+ more than when I bought it last October, and that's ex-VAT. The Q6600 is only barely below what I paid for several of them well over a year ago. Speakers currently cost more than I paid several months ago, PSU's are more expensive, the list goes on.

[DanceswithUnix]

Recently building a PC I was suprised at the rise in price of entry level dual core CPUs. I was expecting to pay based on previous costings:

40 quid motherboard
25 quid 4400+ X2 AMD CPU or similar.

Again, after totting up the current actual cost of parts I said stuff it and bought a Shuttle and an X2 7750BE.
The RAM was cheap though, 32 quid for 4GB of 6400 DDR2. The 4670 video card seemed an OK price, but again I believe it is the same price as when it was released.

[Vimeous]

Just built a pair of crunching machines for a friend.

Q9400; 4Gb DDR3; Asus P5Q3; CM590 inc 500W PSU; Silent HD4670; DVDRW LS; 320Gb F1; Vista Home Prem OEM;
&#163;650 each

Prices are not quite what they were for some items but as always price drops in other areas balance it out.

In testing the CPU performs extremely close to my Q9450 saving &#163;40.
The fanless HD4670's are great value at &#163;65.
The Coolermaster case is superb considering the it came bundled with the PSU for &#163;80!
Maybe I could have saved a little more by sticking to DDR2 but the entire machine runs at 1333MHz and the P5Q3 is now a much more palletable &#163;117 compare to its release cost.

Another &#163;100-150 per machine would have changed the entire spec to an i7 920.

Even the Iiyama 1908 monitor was amazing value at &#163;98 for a 1680x1050 19".

Hunt carefully and keep an eyeout for special offers!