[conspire] question about EIDE ATA hard drive to buy

[Mark S Bilk]

On Tue, Dec 19, 2006 at 11:57:45PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
>Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):
>> I'm confused about brands.
>
>I forgot to add:  When I bought a 250GB IDE drive some months ago at
>Central Computer to use in my old souped-up Cobalt Qube 2 (yet another
>unfinished project), I bought a Seagate.  If memory serves, it cost
>about $15-20 more than the WDC and Maxtor competition -- and I attribute
>that to the better warranty.

Every Friday Fry's has an 8-page ad section in the San Jose Mercury.  
Among many other things, they offer various large EIDE hard drives 
(different ones each week) in sealed end-user boxes with cable, 
manual, full warrantee etc. -- no OEMs -- for 25 to 30 cents per 
gigabyte (about 35 cents per GB for serial ATA).  These days, 
no rebates are involved; the price you pay is simply discounted.  
The sales last from Friday through Tuesday.  I've been very happy 
with Seagates that I've bought this way -- they're quiet and have 
no problems.

Seagate even prints on the box that the drive is Linux compatible, 
which I think all EIDE, SATA, and SCSI drives are anyhow (if the
controller chip on the motherboard is recent enough to deal with
the large amount of storage) but it's nice that they acknowledge 
Linux.