The cheapest terabytes yet arrive

HAPPINESS is sort-of cheaper hard drive storage. I say "sort of" because before you add it, you should figure out if you want to RAID it or back it up onto another cheap hard drive and/or take selective segments and burn them out to dual-layer DVDs on a regular basis.

At around $450 street price, the Western Digital My Book World Edition II (WDMBTEII? Ugh! Marketeers, shorter product names!) 1TB Remote Access Storage System puts a pair of 500 GB drives into an enclosure along with a GigE interface. Just plug it into your GigE router and go to town, basically. If you're among the conservative or paranoid, you can configure it as a RAID 1 drive.

If that doesn't have enough bytes to make you happy, you can pre-order a 1.5 TB version directly from Western Digital at the list price of $700. You may want to consider waiting until the holiday season and the subsequent heavy-duty discounts/incentive programs.

Don't want or desire network storage? The options for simple external drives get to be just as interesting. Hitachi is shipping a 1TB external drive listing at around $420 at the big box, but it only has a USB 2.0 interface on it. Trade that off against two Hitachi 500 GB external drives at $180 a piece list or the Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500 GB drive with dual USB 2.0 and eSATA interfaces for $170 this week or a Western Digital My Book 500 GB drives with USB 2.0 at $130 a piece.

If price is your only factor, the WD MyBook 500 GB drive(s) is a bargain. If you want performance and/or future-proofing, the Seagate FreeAgent looks to be the better deal -- this week. WD also offers a dual interface USB 2.0/eSATA 500 GB external drive for $200 list this week, so you'll see some back and forth.

For external, 500 GB is the current “sweet spot” for pricing with anything under it (160, 250, 320GB) being priced. Unless you're counting every single penny, it's hard to imagine you'd pay $80, $110 or $100 respectively for external drives (yes, you pay more this week for a 250 GB drive then you do a 320; welcome to the pricing insanity of marketing). For an extra $20, you get double the drive size when you put the 250 GB and 500 GB externals side by side.

With any luck, we'll likely see a 2TB external drive with a GigE interface on the shelves in the next twelve months and it'll cost under $500. Perhaps the more interesting bet is to see when the smaller size drive flavours - 160, 250, 320 - just up and disappear, pushed off the shelves by the 500, 1TB and 2TB “bookshelf” devices. You'll still see smaller-sized drives in the “portable” form factor, but that's a discussing for another day. µ