The last 3tb drive I got before the flood was 157CAD now it is at 256CAD while I am in no rush my case is about half full of drives.

so here is my price

hitatchi 3tb @ 150-175 and only if I need more room

 

how about you?

I have price trackers setup on camelcamelcamel.com to alert me when 2TB drives are <$100 and when 3TB are less than <$150.

I'm hoping that the Hitachi 5K3000 3TB falls to under $200.00 again before mid next year. Prices are currently sitting around $300.00.

Are the Hitachis still being made?

I'm waiting for the momentus xt's to drop a lil in pricing and possibly a 1tb 2.5".

Also want to swap out my 2.5" p-ata inventory for the highest 320Gb 2.5" p-ata's. I still have a few devices that use 2.5" p-atas.

I actually have a bunch of spare 2tb's and a couple of 1tb's to RMA, so I'm good there.

I was running out of space - 97% full - so I found one of my old 4 bay eSATA enclosures (and by chance, picked up another one on sale for $50), so I can re-use all my old 500GB drives. I have seven of them, so the additional 3.5TB should tide me over for another ~9 months to a year until drive prices return to their old levels. I think I'll start re-buying when 2TB hit $75, or 3TB hit $125 (yes, I know that could be quite some time).

 

My only real concern is if one of these older drives fail, I'm going to have to replace it with a newer, more expensive drive completely out of pocket, since all their warrantees are expired.

I was running out of space - 97% full - so I found one of my old 4 bay eSATA enclosures (and by chance, picked up another one on sale for $50), so I can re-use all my old 500GB drives. I have seven of them, so the additional 3.5TB should tide me over for another ~9 months to a year until drive prices return to their old levels. I think I'll start re-buying when 2TB hit $75, or 3TB hit $125 (yes, I know that could be quite some time).

 

My only real concern is if one of these older drives fail, I'm going to have to replace it with a newer, more expensive drive completely out of pocket, since all their warrantees are expired.

 

I would recommend preclearing all drives with multiple passes or running badblocks along with smart tests to analyze and exercise each drive.

 

Anything that has pending sectors should be disregarded after the tests.

Anything with a significant amount of reallocated sectors should be disregarded.

Only add in drives that you actually need in the array, while keeping the other drives in place without adding them in.

 

Should you get a failure on a 500GB drive, you can reassign it to another and rebuild it pretty fast.

 

 

I am buying where I left off. 3TB Hitachi Cool Spin 5400 RPM for $109 from NewEgg. Bought 4 at the time and can only fit 2 more into the HP micro server, but since I have 7TB free of my 9TB total storage I am in no hurry. Just to complete the build that is all basically and if I run out of space I'll delete a few TV shows wich should do the trick. Those 4 to 5 season suckers are over 100 Gig each.