Dell Home has the Seagate 1.5TB SATA Hard Drive for $143 – $60 off coupon code HNP1LLLS?ZKS48 [Exp 2/18] = $83 with free shipping.

Are they dumping them?  I just joined the masses that bought one of these drives at a staggering 5.5 cents per megabyte for 1.5 terabytes before the deal quickly died.  This price is about 1/2 the price this drive sells at normally.  There was some question whether this was a misprint – but it appears the drives did ship and mine is on its way.  Wow.

I only bought one since the price was too ridiculously low I had to try.  However, caveat empetor! This is the drive that’s was first plagued with random freezing (especially in RAID setups), then the bad firmware update meant to fix the problem was actually bricking drives, and reports of high failure and DOA rates.  Still, it should make a nice drive to store saved TV programs from my DVR – and if the rumors of it’s early death are true – I won’t be crying too big a river.

As for that, I’ll re-iterate one more time – WHERE ARE YOUR BACKUPS PEOPLE?  You should never have a single drive with the only copy of your information on it.  I have an external eSATA drive that I keep at work for ‘offsite’ monthly backups, a secondary drive that my primaries (in RAID 0) backup to automatically and regularly, AND for my most precious data (photos) I burn 2 DVD copies each time I get a DVD’s worth of data.   Storage is so cheap, you shouldn’t ever need lose data again -even if a drive dies.  And with automated tools, I almost never even think about or do anything myself anymore.  No excuses, get you data backed up.