[mythtv-users] OT: 160GB Western Digital, $30 after rebates

[Brad Templeton]

On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 04:43:23PM -0400, Jeff Simpson wrote:
> > Great price, but these days you start running into limits on how many
> > drives you can put in a system, due to bays, IDE controllers and power.
> > (Though you can buy external usb boxes for more than the post-rebate cost
> > of this drive.)
> 
> I'm one of the lucky few with 4 channels of IDE (up to 8 drives)
> supported in linux (it's an older gigabyte board). So the real limit
> in my system is power, heat, noise, and space! :-)

Even so, do you really want to fill up with drives as "small" as 160gb,
even at just 19 cents/gigabyte.   Now if you want to raid-5, such drives
make more sense if you can buy more than one of them.

I'm being a little extreme here, 160gb is somewhat tolerable, but at
this point I would probably not be very interested in 120gb drives or
less any more.

Plus this drive costs $41 including tax, and you can only get one,
and there is the work of the rebate, and finally the chance you won't
get the rebate (I would rate at 20%) adds another $20 of cost.  So now
it's $61, which is still somewhat attractive, but less so.  I might still
do this a drive to keep offline for backup or long term storage.  At
this price, I could see somebody slapping an archive of favourite shows
onto the drive, and keeping it offline, and then putting it into an external
case if somebody wants to see a show.  Mplayer only of course.