I've spent some time off and on this week searching for the best drive for me...and it seems the Western Digital 320GB drive is the obvious choice at this point. Frankly, the price curve is so flat for all drives that I might as well get the biggest one. The equation for price vs capacity seems to be roughly $.15G +$50, where G stands for gigabytes...a 1 GB drive is about $50, a 100 GB is $65. Honestly, 120GB is probably an ample capacity for my music needs, and I wouldn't have any software compatibility issues, but I can't find any 120 GB drives for less than $60 shipped...if I can get nearly 3x the capacity for an extra $30, it's a simple choice for me. I kept looking online, assuming that some merchant would say "if a customer can buy a 320GB drive for $90, then my wimpy 100GB drive with 1/3 the capacity must only be worth 1/3 the price". I see a few liquidation websites with pages for surplus 100GB or 120GB drives being sold off at cheapish rates, but I'm always too late -- Google sends me to a page that says "sold out" (and probably for months).
The choices in new ATA notebook drives seems quite limited these days, with Western Digital virtually monopolizing the market (and most other manufacturers sticking to SATA now). It appears that WD has succeeded because they've perfected perpendicular recording technology, and can therefore achieve 2-3x higher recording density with roughly the same materials cost as an old longitudinal drive. Is there any reason to believe perpendicular drives are less robust in a mobile environment like the Phatbox? It appears that every iPod with a hard drive uses perpendicular recording, and pretty much every computer sold today also uses perpendicular recording. Did the original drives in our Phatboxes have any special shock resistant features that the WD drives lack? I suppose that all 2.5 inch drives are designed for laptop computers, so must have some shock resistance...
Laptops have been SATA for several years now (the 4-year old machine I'm typing on at the moment has an SATA drive in it), which makes ATA notebook drives relics at this point. In addition, it appears that many older laptops are very picky about the drives that they recognize; many of the surplus/legacy/refurbished smaller-capacity notebook drives (80, 100, 120GB) seem to be targeted at users of specific laptops, who are likely willing to pay a premium for a replacement that will work in their machine. We don't have such restrictions, so there's no point in paying that premium. Any 2.5 inch ATA drive should work for us.
So, if I'm persistent, and I spend several more hours of my life looking for a great deal on a 100GB or 120GB drive, then I'll probably find one in the next month or two for $40 or $50. Then I'll have an old drive, probably without a warranty, maybe refurbished. On the other hand, I can grab a new 320GB drive for $89 shipped, and it comes with a 3-year warranty. Seems like a simple decision, unless someone can tell me why the WD drive is a bad choice (other than the previously-mentioned software issues).
320 GB is a lot of audio. I've seen on some retail drive boxes that the manufacturers like to describe the capacity of their drives in terms of songs or movies. In that vein:
Using 128 kbit MP3, a 320 GB DMS will hold roughly:
65,000 songs.
320,000 minutes of audio.
5,000 hours.
More than 6 months of audio nonstop 24 hours a day.
At 60 MPH on the freeway, you can drive for 300,000 miles before hearing the same music again.
The average person drives 12,000 miles a year. Even with an average speed of 30 MPH, that's 400 hours in the car per year, so the 320 GB hard drive will hold 12.5 years' worth of driving with no repeats.
I'm pretty sure my VW doesn't have another 300,000 miles left in it. I'm skeptical that I will drive another 300,000 miles in my life -- I live 1 mile from work!
320GB should be plenty...
