Screaming deal on 500GB Maxtor Maxline Pro 7H500F0

This deal might last only a few days, or even hours, so act quickly. However, it has appeared once before, and might appear again, should you miss out.

Thanks to amug.org for this tip—a group well worth joining for their reviews and timely news of computer deals.

If you’re looking for more hard disk space, or setting up a RAID, now is the time—750GB drives still sell for about $400; a 500GB drive for 1/3 that price is an incredible deal; it’s $0.26/GB vs $0.53/GB.

NewEgg.com is offering the 500GB Maxtor Maxline Pro 7H500F0 hard drive for only $129.99 using coupon code “FREDSMAXHDD1211”, with free 3-day shipping to most states. You can read about the performance of this drive in my Hard Drives article. TIP — If you order more than one drive, order each drive separately, and the $20 coupon will apply to each.

The 7H500F0 [Maxtor specifications] is my hard drive of choice for RAID, and a perfect way to fill the empty bays on a shiny new Mac Pro. It spins at 7200RPM, and has a 16MB cache. A 4-way striped RAID has a combined cache of 64MB and can sustain about 260MB/sec over a good portion of the drive. (A future diglloyd.com article will distill my years of experience in this area for you to configure your own high performance storage setup).

Note that drive sizes format to less than the official size. This is mostly due to the definition of gigabyte (1000 X 1000 X 1000 vs 1024 X 1024 X 1024), and partially due to the space required to format the drive. A 500GB drive is really a 488GB drive using the power-of-2 gigabyte definition (this is what Mac OS X uses).