Consumerist readers Caskey and Sara went digging through the shelves of a WalMart to see what kind of antiquated computer hardware they could find. They were not disappointed: at least one branch of the store is still selling massive, 2.5GB Seagate drives for $79 (for comparison, consider this $70, tiny 1TB hard-drive with 400X the capacity — I’ve been using one as my office backup drive for a couple months and can personally attest to its reliability). There was more, too — Consumerist has a whole series of them.
If you’re willing to sacrifice half a gigabyte and that glam hockey puck form factor, you could pick up a flash drive for five bucks instead. Maybe this would work out better if you tend to lose small objects.
These two items jumped right out at me. $79 for a 2.5 gb portable hard drive when I can get 8 gb USB thumb drives for $12?!? And the “320 glorious gigabytes” cracks me up.
You can still find Seagate drives of that size for sale, but that doesn’t mean that buying them is a wise investment. Indeed, terabyte drives are cheap.
Decade-Old Hard Drives Languish On Walmart Store Shelves, Make Us Sad [Laura Northrup/Consumerist]