DiskCompare.com

What's a good deal in hard disks? I don't mean which reseller sells a particular model for less than other resellers - but how does one model compare to another in terms of what you get for the money. If you're looking to buy a 400gb disk, does it make sense to spend a little more for a 500gb disk? or are you paying an excessive premium for that extra 100gb?

A good way to compare disks is to look at their value in terms of Gigabytes-per-dollar. Resellers usually don't display that information or make it easy to compare one disk against another, so I whipped together a website named DiskCompare.com that does that, based on prices from Newegg.

So for example, if you're interested in a Seagate 7200.10 500gb disk, you'd see a page like the one below. It compares the Seagate to other 500gb drives, and possibly to larger drives that are not too far off in price - and shows that some Western Digital models give you more for the money (at least at the moment I took this screenshot), although one is at the expense of a smaller cache.

screengrab of dicksompare.com

Other things it shows are relevant reviews, recent Newegg price changes, and price histories for each drive (some of those price changes are a bit shocking, today one SAS drive went up $390)

The site is still a work-in-progress, powered by Django, Python, PostgreSQL, and jQuery. It's been an interesting winter-time project, something to do when it's too dang cold to be outside. If you happen to follow the links on the site to Newegg and make a purchase, I'll get a small commission to help defray my bandwith costs, although I hope the site isn't too obnoxious about it.