Seagate's Luczo: 'Expect a year of misery' Seagate boss Steve Luczo reckons suppliers should brace themselves for 12 months of disk drive pain. Quoted in Bloomberg, Luczo says that the overall disk drive supply chain has been heavily impacted by the Thai floods with many smaller component suppliers down in the supply chain depths flooded out. He mentions 130 suppliers …
Buy external 2TB drive for £100. Open her up, extract drive, you now have a bare drive that is listed on Ebuyer for £200.
Madness, but that's exactly what I did last night as I needed a new bare drive. All of 5 minutes work.
No idea at all why externals can still be easily purchased for normal prices when the drives inside them have doubled. But take advantage while you can!
Most externals are 5200RPM or 5400RPM while the bare drives are 7200RPM? There is also another way to save a royal ton of money, and that is refurbed drives. To makes sure it is good simply take a basic HDD test program (I personally use Spinrite on lvl II, this bypasses the firmware and does a basic read/write cycle on each sector and then reports the results) and if it passes you are good to go. I've bought several and using this test above the 2 that were actually bad were sent back and quickly replaced by good drives, the rest are still running happily, some after 5+ years.
That said your trick works fine if you don't mind a small boot speed hit. i personally am using a 5400RPM 1Tb Samsung as a boot drive and the benches show it 38% FASTER than the 400Gb Seagate it replaced. i'm just glad that right before this happened i bought 3Tb worth of Samsung drives to load in my desktop. I'll be able to ride this out just fine and dandy now!
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