Can anyone explain these prices for me?

[PcmanX1]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822236339

1 tb WD is $59.99
750 GB WD is $84.99

The 250Gb, 320GB, and 500 GB are all about $55. Which is only $5 cheaper than the 1TB version.

What is going on there? 0.0

 

[ThatVietGuy]

Probably trying to get rid of inventory?

There's no singular answer to this.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

There's a certain minimum cost to create a drive, covering the materials, labour, shipping, and a pile of other stuff. This doesn't really change based on the capacity; only the equipment needed to make it, at a guess. It doesn't cost much less to make anything smaller than ~500GB.

750GB drives seem to have gone out of fashion for some reason. 640GB even more so.

 

[Szyrs]

There are also different product ranges. For example a WD Caviar Green is substantially slower than a Scorpio Black, and tend to be much cheaper than other product ranges from the same manufacturer.

Then there are also marketing ploys - for example the same Caviar Greens used to come in SATA II (ezrs) or SATA III (ezrx) - even though you'd be lucky to see a transfer rate above 30MB/sec.

Also as the above user stated, it may just be collecting dust...

 

[Someone Somewhere]

I'm fairly sure you can get at least ~80MiB/s out of a Green drive, but that's still a long way from maxing out even SATA I.

 

[Szyrs]

Yeah, for like the first 5 seconds of your file transfer... Then you may as well put the kettle on..

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Don't have a Green one to test (without getting it out of a fireproof safe), but just wrote a sustained (160GB) file to a 500GB 5400RPM Hitachi laptop drive. Average speed of ~74MB/s, over EXT4 and USB 3.0, writing from /dev/zero (shouldn't be any compression, so shouldn't matter).

 

[Szyrs]

I'll do one tomorrow if you really want but I bought a load a few because I thought the benchmarks on hardware canuks looked pretty decent for storage drives and I remember being quite dissappointed with the actual product. It is possible that I'm recalling the wrong HDDs though, I have a few rigs. I might end up with a red face here hahaha I still think 80MB/s is generous though and I think that we still both agree that the SATA III update was unnecessary 😉

ATTO, CrystalDiskMark or something else - what would you like?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Don't mind. I just wrote a file full of zeros from the command line.

 

[PcmanX1]

So it the WD Blue series drive good?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Yup.