Which would you rather buy?

[Deja Q]

Poll question: Which would you rather buy?

In a quandry... sorry that this isn't the tech section, it's more of a price issue than a PC issue anyway. :-)

[LSK]

1. depends on the brand, i prefer maxtor...

[Placebo]

2. 250GB

You can never have too much storage.

[Droopy]

3. If I had to choose between the two

I'd go for the 160GB one. But the one I have is only 40GB and that's all I need. I've had it for a year and a half and I've only used 7GB.

[lapfog_1]

4. Price per MB is about the same...

I'd say go for the larger drive.

[LDS Jock]

5. I voted 160

because I didn't think anyone else would and I felt sorry for it. Prices have lowered so much on storage you may as well get all you can. Right now it may seem like 160 would be enough forever, but remember people used to think that about stuff like a 5 or 10 GB hard drive.

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

11. I voted for 160GB.

I would never use that much hard drive space. The rest of the money I could save for something else.

[Kellanved]

6. S-ATA or normal IDE?

For a Native Command Queuing enabled system or an older controller?

For normal Ultra-ATA I'd take the smaller drive, with S-ATA the bigger one. Especially so with NCQ.

[Deja Q]

9. Normal ATA. I have no S-ATA at this time...

I WILL when I get Athlon64 though, but that's down the road.

I need the drive primarily for temporary raw video storage. A 90 minute program takes up ~20GB. I'm hardly crippled at this point and I'm cleaning up my current storage drive (40+160GB, taken up with existing projects that I have to re-process and my image store), but extra space could be useful.

My digitizing computer has 200GB total (100 available, for temp storage to be xferred to video cleanup PC)
My video cleanup/image processing PC has 200GB total (20 available)

[2Design]

7. price per GB is $2 - will you use it all before it is time to upgrade

difference of $50 now or later - prices will continue to come down

[MatrixEscape]

8. Make sure your machine's

BIOS can handle the size of the drive you buy. Older machines may not even have an upgrade for the BIOS and you can have a lot of problems, even with an overlay that may come with the drive.

[Deja Q]

10. Oh, I sadly know about the overlay program. I have to use it on my

video capture PC's temp storage drive. Every once in a while, all the drive's data and formatting vanishes in a puff of 'Microsoft Logic'.

I do have a ATA133 controller I could plonk in, but I don't want to deal with the hassle of reformatting WindowsXP, should it BSOD on me instead of finding the new hardware as I don't want to use both the integrated IDE and the external card at the same time. :-(

The vidcap machine's motherboard is the oldest of the bunch, but with configuration issues I opted not to swap it with the SQL server mobo.