Storage turns into a buyer's dream

WHILE the 500 and 750GB monsters from Seagate and Western Digital capture the drooling hearts of bleeding-edge bitheads, anyone with a couple of bucks in their pocket can get lots of storage real cheap, especially external kit. If you are paying more than $0.50 a GB for external storage, you're not shopping hard enough.

How cheap? Western Digital was offering 200 GB external drives with USB 2.0 for $99 in their most recent semi-annual "clear the shelves" e-mails. LaCie 250 GB external drive, designed by F.A. Porsche lists for $139.99 on the company's website, but I can swear I saw it at Best Buy a couple of weeks ago for $129.99; OK, a tad over $0.50 a GB for external storage, but mark up the extra couple of dollars to "design".

Speaking of design, LaCie is now selling their "Brick" 500 GB drive for $349.99 list. The extra dough in this case might be to keep Lego's lawyers at bay, because they look an awfully lot like children's toy bricks, except larger. But I digress.

You'll also end up paying a bit of a premium for density. Seagate's 750 GB external monster (to be fair, it has both Firewire and USB 2.0 interfaces) lists at $0.75 a GB. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing bad about density, because it can save you both space and power, but unless you really need to be the first person on the block to have a 750 GB drive, you might as well wait the six to twelve months for the price drop when they roll out the 1 and 1.5 TB models.

If you want a performance edge, you can find 400 GB internal SATA drives (Western Digital) for $209.00, directly from their website. WD is claiming performance of 300 MB/second. Why am I quoting WD? Seagate doesn't currently do direct sales while Maxtor - soon to be owned by Seagate - doesn't have any bargains this week, so Maxtor's external storage lists out closer to $0.75 GB.

Ironically, all this cheap storage kicking about is going to drive both home and business broadband sales. People are going to hook up their disks and then realize it would be nice to have an off-site storage location to store the family photo albums and videos, so they'll be a push for broadband carriers to provide more symmetrical uplinks; we can't backup gigs of storage overnight with a paltry 768Kbps uplink over a DSL or cable connection.

Google and Microsoft are both lining up to be your personal "Storage Shack", but there's also going to be room for a range of storage-only services differentiated by the amount of stuff (in GB) you want to store and how paranoid you want to be in terms of securing it from fire, flood or government agencies. µ