On Fri, 25 Jul 2008, J Cruit wrote: > Not to add to the slam but if you are looking for multiple drives rather > than one big one (and to maintain an apples to apples comparision) these > Western Digital 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0 drives are only 64.99 > with free shipping. Thats 2 brand new drives with 40 extra GB for 130$, > a 20$ savings off the listing price. > > http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136098 > > Its a shame but hard drives loose their value quickly as cheaper, > faster, bigger, better keeps going on the market. Yep. An old prof at UW-Madison told me that in 1967 they bought a hard drive for their big card-reading computer: The drive cost $66,000 and it held 2 MB ($33,000,000 per GB). In 1986 I bought a 30 MB HDD for $450 ($15,000 per GB). We can now buy a 750 GB HDD for $99 ($0.132 per GB). So HDD price per GB improved by a factor of 2,200 times from 1967 to 1986 and by a factor of about 114,000 times from 1986 to 2008, and the improvement was about 250 million fold from 1967 to 2008. I therefore do not recommend HDDs as investments! ;-) It's the same for flash drives. A friend bought an 8GB flash thumb drive for $27 a few weeks ago. My son bought a 4GB flash at Christmas time for $30. I bought a 1GB flash in 2005 (I believe it was 2005) for $20. So the number of GB per dollar on flash also is increasing at faster than exponential rates. If this keeps up, what will we be buying in 20 more years??!! Mike