Hard Drive Prices increasing through the roof

[TequilaChaser]

just a heads up for anyone who is considering building a new computer or upgrading their Hard Drives

with all the flooding in Thailand, there is a shortage on Consumer hard drives, which is causing extravagant price increases

if you are planning on upgrading or building a new PC, you might want to wait until after 1st of the upcoming year..... for the prices to settle back down

example:  2months ago a WD 2 TB 7200 RPM HD went for around $89.00 .............. at this current time the same HD is going for $329.00



TC

[Skuzzy]

WD was hit the hardest.  Seagate got hit, but not as bad.  Still, what was an $89 drive, two months ago, from Seagate is now $149.

[guncrasher]

I just read that there is no shortage of hard drives, but prices went up because customer's xxxx  you know same excuse they give for gas increases.  but we cant control this so I am waiting till next year to buy the other 3 I was planing.  I got more time than money  .

semp

[TequilaChaser]

one of the several news articles that I had read regarding my original post

http://www.pcworld.com/article/243053/hard_drive_shortage_expected_to_hurt_consumers_most.html#tk.rss_news

edit: and some sources are saying it may take until next summer before the prices come back to normal

for anyone interested


TC

[Chalenge]

Fortunately there is no need to panic since hard drives last for years.

[Dichotomy]

Fortunately there is no need to panic since hard drives last for years.

he said the day before his crashed

[Chalenge]

I have enough. 

[Pigslilspaz]

Fortunately there is no need to panic since hard drives last for years.

But empty space doesnt 

[Chalenge]

The problem is that you dont delete enough I would bet. Keep your Libraries and Documents folders as light as possible. Those two areas and Program Files are what slows down a system the most. People tend to try to make their computer be a jack of all trades and just like humans it can then do nothing as well as it would just one duty. Dont try to do graphics on your programming system or business on your gaming system and things will go better for you. Get a good defrag program too and delete the junk you dont need!

[Krusty]

The point of a computer is that it can do whatever it is programmed to do. You shouldn't have to own (hypothetically) 20 computers to do 20 different things.

While you're right that configuring different OS's different ways will optimize it for one thing or another, there is a general balance that can be held between functionality and performance by keeping your system clean and trim. I don't mean stripped down, and I don't mean engorged, but as trim as can be while allowing you to do those "20 things" you want.

It would be a pretty useless computer if it only did one thing!

I, personally, don't like having to go through and delete things on my HD. Not in bulk. If I want to add a second drive it won't impact my performance any (if it's not the system drive in this case). In that case it's not a matter of deleting files from my documents (and so forth), but of just moving stuff to the new drive.

[Pigslilspaz]

The problem is that you dont delete enough I would bet. Keep your Libraries and Documents folders as light as possible. Those two areas and Program Files are what slows down a system the most. People tend to try to make their computer be a jack of all trades and just like humans it can then do nothing as well as it would just one duty. Dont try to do graphics on your programming system or business on your gaming system and things will go better for you. Get a good defrag program too and delete the junk you dont need!

I only delete things I don't use. Unfortunately, I'm a cinephile, audiophile, and I have emulators and games for every console except for Sega consoles, Xbox 360 and PS3, and all of those take up a lot of storage. Thankfully I'm done downloading for a while now, since I finished downloading my movie choices for the rest of the year.

Did play janitor on my Emulators and cleared out about 40+ gb of unneeded files this weekend, lol.

[Chalenge]

Here is the point. When you deem it time to defrag your system Windows will decide where things are moved to in order to speed things up to optimum. By default Windows will move the system files - everything installed to Program Files - all you Libraries (My Documents) to the fastest area of the disk. Even the best defrag program does this even though it allows you to reassign priorities to different folders. If your HD is more than 50% full and you have it choked with images videos and podcasts (very wasteful for space) then you will move all this junk into the fastest areas of your hard drive. Now... note that I did not mention Aces High. Aces High is now installed outside of all these areas and defrag will ignore its position because it does not have a high priority.

Krusty... while you are correct that a computer can be used for an assortment of tasks you need to consider that all of those programs are installed on one operating system. Windows is not designed well enough to handle being used as a gaming system a graphics artist station a CAD station a programming station and a place for videos and podcasts all at the same time. If you try to do all those things on one system it will be a very polluted system that will do none of these operations smoothly. It will be slow and crash often. You can argue to the contrary but it is still a fact that this will happen.

[Krusty]

I agree that it *can* get bloated and start crashing. My mother's PC does that. She loads it down with webshots and any number of other things, allows a toolbar in there, doesn't weed out launch-ready programs that keep running for apple products, for MS office, etc.

However I think (strongly) that if you keep your PC fairly trim, you turn off all those preloaded annoyances, that you can run a CAD program and it won't impact your system until it is up and running. If you run a game it won't impact your system until you execute it. You can pick and choose any particular program to suit your needs and not load it a second before then, I mean. Until then it's just taking up clusters on the HDD.

[BoilerDown]

Krusty... while you are correct that a computer can be used for an assortment of tasks you need to consider that all of those programs are installed on one operating system. Windows is not designed well enough to handle being used as a gaming system a graphics artist station a CAD station a programming station and a place for videos and podcasts all at the same time. If you try to do all those things on one system it will be a very polluted system that will do none of these operations smoothly. It will be slow and crash often. You can argue to the contrary but it is still a fact that this will happen.

I'm sorry (not really) but if you're saying what I think you're saying, that's a load of crap.  Taking the defragment thing out of the picture, which at least sounds plausible...:

If you have a computer optimized for CAD, and load Aces High on it, it does NOT suddenly get slower at CAD.  If you have a computer optimized for Aces High, and load the hard drive 50% full with videos, it does NOT suddenly get slower at Aces High.  And there is absolutely no reason to expect it to crash more or less often than before.  Your facts are not in fact facts.  At best they are generalizations based on people loading too many things into memory.  At best.  If you keep them out of memory and make sure the hard drive isn't "too" full, you can load whatever you want on the hard drive with no affect on the performance of the primary task.

If you're arguing that a computer can't be optimized for all those tasks, then I'll agree with that.  But no one is talking about that.

[Skuzzy]

Both of you are right, for different reasons.  There are applications available which will create problems for other applications as they rudely (think Roxio for one, Intuit for another) take control or alter the behavior of various aspects of your computer assuming nothing else is going to use that resource.

Any application replacing system files, or trapping interrupts can cause stability problems with other applications.  Many A/V programs can cause stability problems with other applications.  There have been at least two different releases/updates of AVG that stopped Aces High from connecting to the Internet, as one example.  Intuits software requires you to dumb down the security of your computer.  Roxio takes control of your ROM or burner drive with its own system files.

How about software that installs a rootkit?  It impacts everything in your computer.  For a while there you could not plug in a CD/DVD without fear of your computer being taken over by some rootkit.


A correctly written application will not interfere with any other application, but in Windows, there are many applications and utilities which violate this trust.