Hard drive shipments grow rapidly despite recession
 

With the overall economy in recession and prices for even the highest-end hard drives plummeting, it would seem likely that the hard drive industry would be in dire financial straits. A new report from industry analysis firm iSuppli, however, indicates that few things are further from the truth. Hard drive firms are shipping a record number of drives with an average size larger than ever before and are making money hand over fist. The new data has some interesting implications for the industry and for storage at large.

In the first quarter of 2008, iSuppli says hard drive firms sold 137 million individual drives in a variety of form factors for use in laptop and desktop computers, consumer electronics, external hard drives, and enterprise applications. This represents a 21% increase year-on-year in total drives shipped, not a record growth rate for the industry, but above average in a sector which has been growing at double-digit rates for decades, save a brief stutter in 2001.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...recession.html

13 cents per GB for 750GB Seagate OR Samsung drives, they certainly as heck are going to be shipping lots of them! Will soon be half the price then they were last year at this time. Incredibly tempted to buy another 750GB Seagate and RAID 0 them, but have no need for a 1.5TB drive.

what would you put on 750Gb RAID 0? What kind of data don't you care about?

I would buy 1.5TB drives to put them in RAID1/5 just to get hardware failure out of the way as possible data loss cause; then create a second RAID1/5 to do a scheduled incremental backup of the first array so you can restore previous versions as well as recover from OS/software data corruption where RAID doesn't help you at all.

with so much storage space available with a single disk, you can set & forget and use multiple HDD disks to provide enough backup copies that even a complete server-burn-down would not mean data loss:D

Very true.

All my data is backed up however, so I am only interested in a nice performance boost. Because Vista supports Intel chipset RAID out of the box, no driver hassle required, I might RAID 0 two drives when I test out Vista 64bit later on.