Storage on the Cheap
Good through Sunday, October 16th only, Office Depot is having an in-store 18th Anniversary sale. One item of note is a 250GB external hard drive. You’ll notice the online price of $299, which is certainly fair for a triple interface external with an 8mb cache. In the store, however, it’s only $199.99. I just picked one up, and am very tempted to go back before Sunday and snag another…
Edit: Well, it appears that I was too hasty in looking at the box, and didn’t see on Maxtor’s site that this drive is offered in both triple interface and USB-only versions. The sale is on the USB-only version. I’m going to run some tests, and hopefully I won’t have to take it back. :(
Edit 2: Well crap. Sustained transfer is between 8 and 9 MB/s. I need minimum of 10.5 MB/s, and considering that it was writing to the outside portion of a fresh drive, I can only see that number getting worse.
Grrrr. Looks like I’m taking it back and breaking down and buying the triple interface version for $299.99. :( I’ll leave the post up instead of deleting it, both so others that might read this don’t jump before looking like I did, and because it’s still a pretty darned good deal, if one wanted to have a hard drive for a backup solution.
Posted Friday October 15, 2004 in by Derek Jones
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Well I still ended up with a good deal, I just have to wait a few days. Actually, this drive is much better, and is still under $1 a gig, so I’m happy.
I went with the LaCie 250GB d2 Extreme. It’s an Oxford 912 Firewire 800 chipset (as opposed to the Oxford 911 chipset that the non-extreme ones have), so it should be blazing fast. It will especially come in handy when I buy a second one in a few months and stripe ‘em as a RAID! Muahahaha! Oh, and ZipZoomFly had a better price than LaCie.com, and free shipping to boot.
By Derek Jones on October 15, 2004 at 06:21pm link