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This has become the expected price. Hard drives are on the way out much like tape, floppies, zip, and other old technologies. They will be replaced by solid state memory.

My oldest computer just died. It had 2 4GB hard drives (Windows 9. I transferred everything to a single USB flash drive. Flash drives now have much more capacity and soon we will be seeing them 100GB and higher.

For sale: Two collector item hard drives.

Same prices in stores. Can't use the 10% coupon floating around the 'net. Plus tax. Plus the service agreement the guy at the door tries to sell you.

I picked up each of my Maxtor 320 GB drives at a different time from a different store for $50, so that's a reasonable price to expect for that size. 500 GB should be $75 or less by now.

Besides which, with 1TB hard drives hitting below $200 more and more often (twice in the past week, at Best Buy and [I believe] Frys), $100 for 1/2 the capacity isn't all that great of a deal anymore.

While solid state is likely the way of the future (or possibly, little glowing cubes like we saw in Star Trek! ), it's still going to be a few years before they'll be big enough and priced well enough to replace the spinning platters. Especially as hard drives are still being priced at $0.20/GB, and flash drives are still in the $5/GB range.

Keep in mind that cache size is driving some of the pricing here. Those 320's are probably 8MB cache drives - this is a 16MB.

Best I've seen on 500/16's is about $90 - just below $100 seems to be pretty standard, though while I wouldn't expect to see $75 anytime in the next couple of months save for genuine "deals", I would think that $90 will become the norm.

RAM is so cheap nowadays, why aren't we seeing 1GB cache? Seems to me that drives should come with DDR slots.

Click on the history link for this thing, above or here:
http://bensbargains.net/history/61812
It's been $100 for 10 months!
I don't understand how 500GB/16MB/$100 hard drives can be considered a deal when they've been this price for almost a year, in a world where most computer/technology/electronic products are dropping in price all the time.

It might be a demand thing. Unless you are a pirate or porn mongering I don't really see the need for the general consumer to have anything more than 200 gigs. I find myself interested in getting a new hard drive (I have had this 80 gig SATA WD Raptor for 3 years now) and the only reason I can see to switch is for increased throughput of these newer drives and not really for extra capacity.

#7- How much was a dollar worth against the Euro ten month ago and how much is a dollar today? Was any hard drive made here in the USA? Considering the value of the $, the price is dropping.

#8, Drives are now at 320GB/platter, anything much less than that is old tech and slower. Even if you had only 200GB, you'd get higher performance moving up to a 2 platter drive so the majority of the data is on outer tracks of the platters.

Maybe some use the space for pirating pron mongering, or other uses like video capture and storage, though I like to rip games from DVD and use no-CD cracks so I don't have to juggle a bunch of discs. You might be surprised though, how much a data store grows over years, but many choose to use a fileserver or NAS for that... which still needs hard drives.

The Samsung F1 750GB hard drive is currently on sale for $122 shipped at zipzoomfly.com. It has the highest data density on the market, giving it the highest performance of current SATA drives in a variety of benchmarks. This seagate drive has a lower data density compared to the samsung drive, so it has lower performance. Plus, the samsung drive has a 32mb cache, although that won't help performance much for most common loads. With a price of $0.16/gb, it's an amazing deal. link: http://bensbargains.net/deal/61517/

#5, my $50 drives are Maxtor model STM3320620A with 16 MB cache. Top-of-the-line drives don't follow the cost/GB trend, but with 750 GB and 1 TB drives available now, the 500 GB ones really shouldn't be more than $80.

Solid state is still quite slow, and there has been a limit on how many writes you can do so that while they work for little handy flash drives, don't use one for your paging file.

I like where you're coming from #10. I've ripped games to disc before too and that is quite handy.