SSD Posted January 30, 2009 Share Posted January 30, 2009 I guess this a good deal if it is the only deal! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136344 Hopefully the price will come down steeply from here. The price point needs to get to about $172 to equal the price per gig of the Seagate 1.5T. I think once it gets below $200 it will be a viable choice. At $299, it is a substantial premium. I have read about the difficulties of getting higher data densities and the fact that we may be getting close to the limit of the perpendicular recording technology. It will be interesting to see if WD has a better implementation than Seagate. Hopefully WD learned from Seagate's bad experiences and perfected their technology before introducing. What a difference a little time makes. 6 months ago everyone was singing the praises of Seagate and questioning WDs shorter warranty, slower drive speeds, and lack of a 1.5T offering. Now Seagate has cut its warranty, had nothing but trouble with their 1.5T drives, and most recently has had firmware issues with many of their 7200.11 drives of ALL sizes. WD, with their "green" drives and now top of the heap drive size is beginning to look like the hero! The healthy competition between them is good for us, the consumer. Hopefully Seagate will fire back quickly with a solid 2G (2.5G?) offering! Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted January 30, 2009 Share Posted January 30, 2009 $299 is actually normal for first run highest capacity drives. I remember buying many highest capacity drives at that price range. Give it time and they will drop. >> 6 months ago everyone was singing the praises of Seagate and questioning WDs shorter warranty, slower drive speeds, and lack of a 1.5T offering. I was never part of that crowd. I bought "many" of the 1TB green drives particularly because of the slower drive speeds. I bought a few 500GB drives for my ITX machnes too as they ran cooler. >> WD, with their "green" drives and now top of the heap drive size is beginning to look like the hero! I don't know if we can sing praise for WD yet. We still have to see how the technology works in the mass market. Chances are they will do good. It's going to be interesting when drives get larger then basic file systems can handle them. I'm surprised flash/solid state technology has not gotten denser and cheaper yet. Link to comment
bubbaQ Posted January 30, 2009 Share Posted January 30, 2009 Also the latest "D" version of the WD green drives have substantially better performance that the prior "C" versions, as well as even lower power consumption. In most tests, they rival performance of 7200 RPM drives now. Link to comment
SSD Posted January 30, 2009 Author Share Posted January 30, 2009 I noticed that the specs page on the Newegg site show this as a 7200 RPM drive. Is that true? Aren't these all "D" drives that run at closer to 5400 RPM? Link to comment
JRS Posted January 30, 2009 Share Posted January 30, 2009 I doubt it is 7200rpm... like the other green drives, the WD site lists its rpm as "intellipower"... must be some new fangled speed... lol http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=576&language=en This is exciting just from the standpoint that we are not far from a 30TB unRaid box without having to run 20+ drives. Considering the newegg price and the "limit one per customer", there aren't many out yet. It could be awhile before we see sub $250 (summer?) and maybe a long while (fall?) to see <$200 Link to comment
SSD Posted January 30, 2009 Author Share Posted January 30, 2009 We'll have to see. There is a group of consumers that will buy these guys at a huge premium. But a much larger group that will not pay a huge premium. WD is at the top of the heap size-wise, and could decide to keep the prices high and not sell too many, or let the prices fall to compete on a $/gig basis. Then they'd sell more. The Seagate 1.5T are down to $130! No mention of the WD 1.5T pricing but they can't be too much more - $20 would be a lot. Truth is the cost to manufacture the bigger ones vs the smaller ones is likely not that much. I predict these 2T drives under $250 by end of Feb, and ~$200 by end of Apr. By summer they'll be $180. Link to comment
JRS Posted January 30, 2009 Share Posted January 30, 2009 I think some of the quick price drop to the Seagate 1.5T is because of the issues it was having, but how much, I dunno. I agree - cost to manufacture a hard drive regardless of size is probably close to the same. My brother used to own a golf bag company - their low end bag sold close to $100 retail, their high-end, many hundreds of $. The manufacturing cost difference was about five bucks. When they sold a low-end bag, they made almost no profit off the bag. I hope you are right on ~$200 by end of April. That would be nice. Link to comment
Nyago123 Posted January 30, 2009 Share Posted January 30, 2009 I predict these 2T drives under $250 by end of Feb, and ~$200 by end of Apr. By summer they'll be $180. I'd agree with that. If you put "wd20eads" into froogle.google.com, you can already find some vendors near the $250 point. I'd probably get one for around $225, but even so it's hard for me to justify to myself paying an extra 75-100% for 33% more space compared to the Seagate 1.5TB (warts and all). Fortunately, I can wait a bit, but I might have to rationalize buying one of these before the price/GB is the same as current drives in the name of "educational evaluation for potential future purchases". Link to comment
erikatcuse Posted January 30, 2009 Share Posted January 30, 2009 I think it also depends on how low the 1TB drives dip to as well. If I could start getting them for 70 or less now I'd want 2TB drives at 175 or less. I'd be willing to pay a small premium since you now have less drives in the system but not that much more. Link to comment
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