It's in the friday advert section in the Bay Area. Either SATA or PATA drives, Seagate brand, for $270/ea. It didn't say "one per customer" in the ad, but they often impose limits. It did NOT say "rebate" either. I'll probably get two for my KM box.

Fry's advert in SJ Mercury News

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Pretty big jump in price from $140 for a 500 gb drive...

Having it all on one partition.... "Priceless"

Also, online Frys.com for everywhere!

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// Brian - Hardware:
ASUS P5P800 - P4 3Ghz, 500 GB PATA HD
ASUS P5K-V - P4 Core2 Duo, 500 GB SATA HD
Hauppauge PVR-350, IR Blaster, Comcast Digital Cable
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/KnoppMyth/
KnoppMyth R5F27 >> R5.5

UPDATE:

So on March 20, 1007, I stopped in at my local Fry's store and picked up at 500 GB Seagate for $179.99 Not bad,

Yesterday (April 16, 2007), I stopped in at another local Fry's store, and looked at the pallet of 500GB drives.. marked with the same sticker at $179.99 .. I debated the issue, thinking that I would use this drive as either a test drive or as a backup.. (obviously, it would be better if the backup drive was the same size or large.) .. but fast thinking won over good conscience, so I opted to purchase the 500 GB drive (PATA)

At the register, the drive rang up at $119.99 (and it was not a clerical error!) ... whaaaahooo, a "secret sale price!"

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// Brian - Hardware:
ASUS P5P800 - P4 3Ghz, 500 GB PATA HD
ASUS P5K-V - P4 Core2 Duo, 500 GB SATA HD
Hauppauge PVR-350, IR Blaster, Comcast Digital Cable
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/KnoppMyth/
KnoppMyth R5F27 >> R5.5

I bought a 500 gb Seagate from a local Fry's not too long ago. The 'regular' sale price was 139.99... So $179 = not so good, but $119 is GREAT !!

I just got two coupons in the mail from staples. $25 of a $50 purchase, and $50 off a $100 purchase. They have a 200gb for $50, and a 500gb for $139. Decisions, decisions....

well, the 500 is less the 2.5 times the cost of the 200, if you have the money, cleary go with the 500

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

Or I could have 600gb (3x200gb) for $75. This got me thinking. My box has a SATA hard drive, and an IDE DVD drive. I think my motherboard has two IDE connections, so I could physically connect three of these drives. But I feel like its asking for trouble... anybody reading this have any thoughts?

Steve

I've got two PATA HD, one PATA DVD, and one SATA HD in my box with no problems. They could probably use more ventilation, bu the temps are stable and not all that bad.

That's cool. (pun not intended!) Curious, did you put the two PATA drives on separate IDE channels.. or same? .. and which channel did you put the DVD drive?

In my case, I'm sticking with using (operationally) a single 500 GB PATA drive. <1> lower power consumption, <2> lower noise output. (the box is in the master bedroom.. so noise is an issue!)

Hopefully, making the jump from 200 GB to 500 GB will keep it managable (I've been close to the ceiling a few times with the 200 GB drive!) for at least a few years! (or until the dark force of HD comes upon us!)

In another thread, I talk about "cloning" one drive to another.. so I've got a "mirror" in the second 500GB drive.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14937

I've done the procedure twice, so I think I have the idea down pretty good. (first time: 200 GB to 500 GB, second time: 500 GB primary drive to 500 GB backup drive.)

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// Brian - Hardware:
ASUS P5P800 - P4 3Ghz, 500 GB PATA HD
ASUS P5K-V - P4 Core2 Duo, 500 GB SATA HD
Hauppauge PVR-350, IR Blaster, Comcast Digital Cable
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/KnoppMyth/
KnoppMyth R5F27 >> R5.5

Currently running a mix of PATA and SATA in my MBE.

Traditional IDE cables could contribute to less airflow or constriction of airflow but there are some of the round IDE cables out there. As far as performance they would be similar if IDE were connected with 80 pin cables and running multiple IDE drives doesn't seem to present any particular problems to my config.

On another note:
Not trying to hikack the conversation here, but another discussion I was reading regarding feeding multiple video sources to a Master Backend starts to make sense.

A drives performance is typically rated as sustained write of one contigous file.

When you have multiple threads running to your drive array, a single drive would need to switch back and forth as to which data source it was wirting to the drive at any given time. This implies that the files would tend to be contigous and written in different locations. The heads would be seeking each new location at a given time.

Assuming you have two streams running and are using a traditional SDTV capture card that generates 1 gig per hour, you are feeding about 277Kbytes per second per stream to the drive electronics. Since these are presented equally in time, one could possibly assume that given an 8 Mbyte write cache on a drive, about every 15 Seconds the drive would need to "Switch" which file it was writing and seek the new location to start writing to. Then switch back after a similar time, repeating.

The math isn't perfect in fact it is only meant to paint a picture, HDTV would multiply that by an additional factor probable 5X at least.

Drives do have a finite life expectancy. And the interaction above would increase appropriately with more streams thus decreasing the life expectancy we may see.

Pata or Sata configured in normal fashions operate as sequential drives, filling one then the next then the next.

So anyway, given the wear and tear abuse we put these drives through, Most of us have multiple tuner cards it might be better at least for now to run multiple drives, although multiple electronics increases the failure points and complexity of the configuration.

If we follow finite life, drives are going to die. One big drive dies you lose all the data, one of three dies you have only completely lost what was on that drive. the others may be able to be recovered. but moving as you can to multiple big drives may be the best approach. I know 600 gig is limiting to the waf right now and I only added the 320 2 months ago. HDTV would really use that up.

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KnoppMyth R5.5
MBE: AMD64 3400+, K8N Neo4 Plat., 1Gig, Asus Extreme N6200, 320G pata, 2x320Gsata, 750Gsata, PVR-150 Retail w/Blaster
SBE: AMD XP2000, GA 7ZMMH, 1 Gig, XFX 256M 6200, 20 Gig, PVR-150 Retail w/Blaster
SBE: AMD Dur1800, 512M, PVR500

Be sure to give thought to future expandability. I understand that 600 GB for $75 is a super deal, but keep in mind that 600 GB may sound like a lot of space now, but I've found that once you get more space you tend to fill it faster than you'd think. I guess that's the point of getting more space. If you need to expand again, getting your data from those 200 GB to a larger drive may be a pain in the butt if you have no free HD headers on the mobo.

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Mike
My Hardware Profile

I see your point about all the jumping around, but even with one tuner card, after awhile all the recordings and deletions will leave you with a fragmented disk drive and all kinds of jumping around. See this fairly recent discussion:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/261741

So after reading this I'm thinking that two tuners is not causing dramatically more stress than one. Which is good because I have a third tuner on order Anyways, many of us run post-recording processing and that might be a lot worse than the actual recording. In fact, the entire ATSC data stream from all subchannels combined is limited to 19.28mbps. USB 1.1 is 12mbps by comparison. And most digital television is not even HD. An SD stream is less than 20% of the resolution of an HD stream.

I think modern disks can handle all of this pretty well. And an occasional backup goes a long way. Looks like I've added something to my todo list for tonight

Yeah, that's a good point. Plus, the noise and the heat will be a lot more from three drives. And power consumption, I'd probably need a new power supply. So all that negates any savings.