Sticker Shock.

Hal loses his innocence. Mark guffaws.

Hal: I had a surprise in July. I went to upgrade the hard drive in my PC tower and got sticker shock.

Mark: What did you want to buy? A SAN?

Hal: No. I just wanted a new SCSI drive. My system is five years old and I've been using two HDDs in it--a 1GB and 3GB drive.

Mark: What was it that administered the shock?

Hal: The price of new SCSI drives.

Mark: Well, they've always been more expensive than IDE drives. After all, SCSI is the industrial-strength interface.

Hal: Well, sure, and I expected to pay a premium of, oh, ten percent or so, but imagine my surprise. I had to pay over $300 for a new 18GB drive.

Mark: What were you expecting?

Hal: Maybe I've been reading my own columns too long, but there are 36GB drives out there for the same money--

Mark: Yes, but only in IDE or do they call it ATA now?

Hal: Right. ATA and "ATAPI" if it's for a laptop.

Mark: So did you buy that 18GB drive?

Hal: Of course and, by the way, I also learned that, for my given capacity-point, there's essentially no difference in price among competing brands. IBM, Seagate, Quantum ... they were all within ten dollars of one another.

Mark: I remember when product-differentiation was a big deal.

Hal: Me too, but I guess it's not important anymore. The point is: I've been writing for years about how the price of hard drives has tumbled down to a penny a megabyte and here I was paying almost 20 cents a megabyte!

Mark: Come on, Hal. You're not doing a straight-across comparison. It's the newest, highest capacity drives that cost pennies per megabyte--and they're all SCSI drives. What surprises me, though, is that you've been able to work with only 4GB of capacity all these years.

Hal: Actually, it's the 1GB drive that I wanted to replace. I'm keeping the 3GB drive for backups and as a buffer when I bum CDs and, anyhow, a 3GB C: boot drive was all I needed until I got Microsoft Office.

Mark: Uh oh. I know all about Microsoft's bloated code.

Hal: That's one factor, but what was more important fox my system was that, with Microsoft applications, everything wants to live on your C: boot drive. So I needed a really big C: boot drive.

Mark: Microsoft's apps also want to control all of your storage resources. The default is always to store your files in the application' s root directory.

Hal: So that's why I needed more gigabytes. I should have remembered what I wrote in my June column: that Gates got rich in the first place by forcing users to upgrade their hardware too!

Mark: Hurry! Hurry! Step right up! Everybody's a winner!

Hal: I don't exactly feel like a winner right now.

Mark: If you think SCSI is expensive, what about the new Fibre Channel interface? The analysts at IDC are talking about a per-port cost of $800 or more. That's how you spell "sticker shock."

Hal: Well, by the time I need to upgrade from a personal computer to a personal SAN, I'm sure I'll be able to afford it.

Mark: Ahh, but by then, you can be sure that there will be yet another new, high-speed interface.

Hal: That's okay because, by then, everything else will have migrated down the food chain: Fibre Channel will be the new SCSI and SCSI will be the new ATA.

Mark: ATA will be in every consumer product. Didn't you write about HDDs in home-video recorders?

Hal: Yup and there's no doubt that those are ATA drives.

Mark: Let's ask our readers about the future of HDD prices. If you think they've got nowhere to go but down, email me at [e-mail].

Hal: If you think prices are still too high, email me at [e-mail].