Call me el cheapo if you must.. but I'm still nursing a 400gb drive until the hard drive price wars return. Back to school means back to no rebates or deals on hard drives.. Sure, historically price per gb goes down but there are better times to buy than others. With cpu's it seems that companies are waiting until 1 year passes upon new chip introduction to cut the price... so for the older Intel i5, i7 series (chips released September - November 2009) to see a 20-25% price chop.
BTW, yes you are showing your age if your restoring data from old DATA cartridges which stored anywere from 40mb - 1gb in the 1990s. Today you'll need to spring for a Blu-Ray Drive at about the same price. I can't even find 25-50gb of movies and data to backup at the moment to justify the purchase, therefore time is on my side until they invevatibly cut the price of old tech... 🙂