[SGVLUG] Cheap drives at Fry's

[Emerson, Tom]

> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of Dustin
> On Thu, 8 Sep 2005, Jeff Kutz wrote:
> 
> > ... I suspect 
> > they are teasers, meant to get you in the store rather than 
> > to have one available to sell to you.

That is bordering on a technique known as "bait and switch", which I'm surprised to see at Fry's.  OTOH, I've generally come to regard Fry's as the "big-lots" [or "pic-n-save" for you old timers] of consumer electronics, so I generally use Fry's as a sounding board for prices rather than a reliable source...

> Perhaps, but they are ATA100, and the current PATA spec is 
> ATA133.  So they are also unloading old stock while it's still saleable.

did anyone else notice the sudden "marketing opportunity" to point out that these are "parallel"-ata versus "serial", when in reality they are the "same old drives they've sold for years"?  [or more accurately, "the same old drive INTERFACE they've sold for years" -- I suspect the drive mechs themselves are the same whether they provide data in parallel or serial...]

> Which reminds me--IIRC current drives are still far from 
> saturating ATA100 for sustained transfer ...
> I was thinking of getting one or two of these for storing big 
> media files, where the sustained transfer rate ... matters.

Here is where a raid setup pays off (provided you can place each drive on it's own controller) -- with a mirrored raid, the system simply reads whichever drive is "ready"; with striped, you are alternating reads between drives -- either way, you are (or should be) attempting to read at less than the "sustained" rate for any given drive.