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this has been $79.99 at zzf for ages!

This is also often $80 at Newegg and I'd buy from them over eWiz any day of the week.

I got one from newegg for $67.50 w/ free shipping last Thursday. It commonly sells on newegg for 74.99 w/ free shipping, and there was a 10% discount for all newsletter subscribers on HDs.

get the Hitachi over this one... The Sustained transfer rates on it are MUCH higher

thanks for the info.

i prefer samsung spinpoint f1 over any comparable hitachi drive. most of the reviews confirm.

Hm... so, it's about 8 cents per gigabyte, which is... which is... getting damn close to the price of decent DVD-R media. Reliablility sucks, though. Not this particular drives reliability, HDDs in general. Useability is great, on the other hand... So, if I put my 18+ TB collection on 18 HDD of these... and double that for backup... 36 drives ~ $2,900... burp. Neigh, not now, let the price slide further.

#7, you are paying too much for DVD-R media. According to your previous post a decent DVD-R costs about 32 cents. Verbatim DVD+Rs go on sale for around 15 cents.

I know, #8... the $15 per 100 Verbatim deals are rare and limited 1 per household. I need more blanks, and the best price for Taiyo Yuden premium line I was able to find today was $26/100 plus S/H at Rima-dot-com. Of course, it's still much cheaper per gig than HDD... but not five or ten times cheaper, as it used to be. The price gap is closing.

I guess, DVD media wouldn't come down considerably, looks like it's already on the thinnest margin possible. HDDs, on the other hand, show confident tendency down. So, maybe it's time... not to start buying, but start thinking about it more seriously.

#7, why do you need backup of your 18TB collection? What's it stored on now? Ever hear of raid5? You don't need double the drives.

#9, a few months ago OfficeMax had an in-store sale price of $15+tax on the Verbatim DVD+Rs with a printable coupon. The catch was that you could only buy one per visit. So I went to the store twice. I could have bought more but I didn't need any more at the time.

Here is the deal I am talking about:
http://bensbargains.net/deal/88866/

#10, currently it's on DVDs, which sucks when it comes to actually streaming something out of it. That's why I'm thinking of HDDs. However, RAID-5 for 18+ TB of data would drain from me considerably more than ~$2,900, I'm afraid. I understand that the right way is to keep DVDs for backup and put streaming data onto HDDs, without doubling it. Still $1,800 though... and it's burp growing...

@pkn:
I hope you never get a job in an IT department and professionally manage data backup. I also hope you delete some of that porn.

Seriously though, if you're even considering backing up 18TB of data and you're not considering a server farm, you're either an rodeo cowboy or out of your league.