A dollar a gigabyte

I’m in the process of upgrading the servers here, in anticipation of their move to the new silverorange/reinvented data centre.

The server that powers this website is far, far less powerful than you might imagine it to be: it’s a generic 233 MGHz Pentium II with a 4GB hard drive. Not greased lightning, in other words.

I’m preparing to replace it with the machine that used to be my Windows 2000 desktop, which is a 500 MGhz Pentium III bona fide IBM machine. It’s a trusty piece of iron that has served me well, and has a lot of life left in it. Although it isn’t a greased lightning server either, it’s more than up to the task of running the operation here.

But it only had a 4GB hard drive, which isn’t really enough space to store everything that I’d like to store.

So I went out to Future Shop today and bought a 160GB Western Digital hard drive. With rebate (the standard Future Shop “price is lower than you think” trick), the price was $169 before taxes. Or about a dollar a gigabyte. And it came with a free UltraATA controller card.

The irony is that this price makes it both cheaper than the generic “Cicero” brand 160GB drive, and cheaper than the 80GB Western Digital drive of the same series.

It installed in the old IBM machine easily, and RedHat Linux is chugging away at its installation right now.

I can’t actually conceive of a drive that’s 160GB — my first IBM machine had a 20MB drive, and I thought that was basically infinite.

I’m sure, however, that I’ll fill it up in short order.

The $169/160GB drive is on sale this week at Future Shop. Be prepared for the usual “would you like an extended warranty with that?” routine.