There are basic costs associated with creating hard drives.  The cost of the
materials is about the same.  If they still made 40MB drives (yes, MB, not
GB) they'd be about $50 new.  Eventually you just can't go any lower.

As far as stability they'll be about the same.  However, if this is a
mission critical application, as you say stability is most important, you
should look into a SCSI solution and stay away from IDE RAID.

Aaron

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jared Smith" <jared@trios.org>
To: <kclug@kclug.org>
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2003 11:26 AM
Subject: Hard drives, quality

> I'm buying four identical drives for RAID 5. I'm hoping to buy IBM, but if
> someone has a better suggestion, I'm open by virtue of good evidence.
> What puzzles me is, a 20G drive is $92. An 80G drive is $106.
> What's up with that? I need stability above all; is the 20G
> a better buy for this reason? Can anyone please explain
> why it's roughly the same to buy these two very different sizes?
>
> 20G
> http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100414
>
> 80G
> http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100418
>
> -Jared
>
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