relatively new to buying hdd's...but i remember being stoked to find a 500gb for a hundred bucks.

i remember when people said "stoked"

Ha

Chop low.

Hard drives are amazingly predictable. The mainstream size seams to always hover around $50, with the next bigger jump usually hovering around $70. What kills me is that you would think I could find some surplus 80GB drive for $10? But...no.

Excellent observation, #5 - there is a reason behind that phenomenon.

Manufacturers will continue to make the older, smaller capacities to fulfill warranty replacements and expansion of things like RAID disk shelves. As they ramp up their production lines on higher capacity drives, the alter the firmware to make the newer, bigger drives match the specs of the older, smaller ones. Their cost to produce both units is the same, hence the flattening of the price per gigabyte curve at the low end of the spectrum.