[SGVLUG] Cheap drives at Fry's

[Dustin]

On Thu, 8 Sep 2005, Emerson, Tom wrote:

> That is bordering on a technique known as "bait and switch", which I'm
> surprised to see at Fry's.  OTOH, I've generally come to regard Fry's as
> the "big-lots" [or "pic-n-save" for you old timers] of consumer
> electronics, so I generally use Fry's as a sounding board for prices
> rather than a reliable source...

What do you mean, exactly?

> > Which reminds me--IIRC current drives are still far from 
> > saturating ATA100 for sustained transfer ...
> > I was thinking of getting one or two of these for storing big 
> > media files, where the sustained transfer rate ... matters.
> 
> Here is where a raid setup pays off (provided you can place each drive
> on it's own controller) -- with a mirrored raid, the system simply reads
> whichever drive is "ready"; with striped, you are alternating reads
> between drives -- either way, you are (or should be) attempting to read
> at less than the "sustained" rate for any given drive.

True, but they're 1 to a customer, so it's hard to get matched drives. 
:-)

Well, for the 200 Gb drives.  The 160's are not, though the rebate coupon
says 1 per SKU per household.  Not being up on marketing jargon, I don't
know whether that's saying you can't use more than one coupon per
household for the entire offer or merely the commonsense one of one per
drive (since you are expected to print it from the PDF you can make as
many coupons as you want and the drive would be free).  I suspect the
latter, but if it is the former it would be pointless to buy more than
one.

Dustin