Due to a change at my web-host - the price comparison engine had some technical issues. I’ve fixed these now - and the site should work again!

Price data collection has not been affected.

I’ve just spotted an interesting product review on Toms Hardware- it’s similar in some ways to the USB SATA adapter I’ve mentioned before on here - but it’s similar to a desktop docking station to your PDA.. It sits on your desk and then you can just slide SATA’s into it to access them. Here’s a pic so you can get the idea:

It’s probably of little interest to consumers - I don’t access bare SATA drives often enough to warrant buying this - but it’d certainly be of use to professional PC repair guys swapping out drives all day long!

I can’t find a link to anywhere selling this at the moment - if anyone spots it for sale anywhere please leave a comment.

Edit: Spotted one on Amazon - currently out of stock though :(.

After reviewing the listings and listening to users - I’ve changed the listings slightly to incorporate delivery charges by default (you can still see the listings without delivery if you like though).

The reason for this is because some companies charge fairly high delivery costs and this is skewing the results.

My advice about the new listings is to compare based on cost per gigabyte DELIVERED if you are just buying one item - ie. a flash card, but if you’re buying quite a few items compare based on cost per gigabyte WITHOUT delivery.

Hope that makes sense to people - and it improves the usefulness of the listings.

Just thought I’d drop a note on here to say that there has been an import problem with a couple of retailers over night. Unfortunately the issue is out of my control, and I’m just waiting on the data becoming available!

The affected retailers are BT and Play.com.

I’m waiting on the data feeds becoming available again - sorry for the inconvenience to anybody.

The Register is running an article or two which shed a bit of light on what we can expect over the next few years for consumer storage. BitMicro is manufacturing SSDs up to 1.6TB in size, currently being offered in Fibre channel and soon normal SCSI formats, these drives offer a peek at the type of stats the SSD’s will offer.

Mouthwatering stats: 230MB/sec and 30,000 IO/sec, able to withstand 1,500G force and be used in -40 to +85 degrees C. Available in standard 3.5″ drive format.

The drives are currently being aimed at the military and companies with money-to-burn - no mention on the price - somehow I doubt they’ll be 12p/gig… But just think of a few of those in a RAID!

As I’ve said before on here - it won’t be long before SSD’s are mainstream - and we’ll look back and wonder why we had silly spinny-disks in our PCs and laptops!

I’ve just added Crucial Technology UK to the mediaprices price referencing engine.. So you should see Crucial prices dotted around now. I’ve noticed that they overtake some of the areas with long listings for the same products, eg. DDR2 and am looking to see if I can do anything to reduce this. Until then - it’s not such a problem.

Otherwise - have fun hunting for bargains!

The site has had quite a good reception - we’re getting lots of hits and return visitors to the memory price pages - but people seem to be a bit shy of posting to the forums! I’ve got to admit that a blank forum doesn’t inspire everyone’s creative sides..

So to encourage the users of mediaprices.co.uk to post on the forums - I’m offering a Western Digital 500GB My Book Essential (a USB 2.0 external drive in a cool looking case) to the best post over the next month (well - March 9th).

I hope it encourages people to chat about storage/media/flash/ram and how they use it - because although I’m sure some people see it as a boring subject - 500GB of storage is never boring …. Or is that just me?

I’ve just added picstop.co.uk to the list of retailers indexed by the pricing engine - they seem to be coming up with very good prices in the flash area of the site.

I’m just going to write up a quick article explaining the graphs that I’ve just added to the site. Although I think they are really easy to read - I know a lot of people might wonder what they mean.

So lets start by stating the obvious:

• Storage devices come in vary sizes
• Different size devices have differing ‘price-per-gigabyte’ costs.
• The ‘cost-per-gigabyte’ differs because different sizes are more desirable than others.

For example a 1TB hard drive might be in greater demand than a 500GB. So the price of the 1TB item is more per gigabyte than the 500GB, eg:500GB = £ 50 (cost per gigabyte= £ 0.10)
1TB = £ 120 (cost per gigabyte= £ 0.12)

Now - you may not be too bothered about getting the biggest size hard drive as possible - and so you can pick up a bargain with the 500GB drive. The historical data is useful as you can see prices on ‘premium’ drives (1TB say) dropping, and possibly ‘bargain-basements’ (250GB say) raising, and you should be able to take quite a good guess at when a 1TB drive will become comparatively cheaper than a 500GB.

The idea behind the graphs is they allow you to view the history of the memory card/hard drive/RAM prices - and see the history of each respective data size - eg. 160GB drives might be less desirable than a 320GB, but you can buy 2 and save money.

I heard the other day about the newly announced Canon 450D - the replacement model for the Canon 400D.

I’ve been an avid supported of Canon for a while now, having had a 350D and a 400D… It amazes me how the manufacturers keep pushing up the megapixels squeezed into these DSLR’s!

Which brings me onto how this connects with this site — I’m VERY surprised that Canon seem to now be moving in the direction of SD (HC) instead of keeping with the tried-and-trusted Compact Flash for their pro-sumer range… I suppose it’s a sign of the times when the good ol’ compact flash at 3cm x 4cm is just too big!