Ok, I'll bite; how is anyone supposed to "quit paying them at some point"? In my area you have two choices, either Comcast or Verizon. I know plenty of people who use one or the other (I use Comcast myself) and no one and I mean no one likes either one. People complain endlessly about the service, the support, the cost of equipment or what seems like annual price hikes of $1 here and a dollar there. And don't get me started on Verizon, they make it so that to use the channel lineup on your cable boxes you have no choice but to use their junky Actiontec router that is not only difficult for anyone but the most advanced user to program but also many of the advanced features you find on Linksys, Netgear or Asus routers don't work properly. But for the sake of this argument, what if in the end both Verizon and Comcast throttle Netflix, what are people going to do and who do you suggest they switch to? It's a very closed market with only those two choices (in this area anyway) for internet and TV service and it's just not realistic to say "just quit paying" because you say to Verizon "You're throttling my Netflix and the service is unusable so I'm not paying you this month" and Verizon will happily say "Ok, we're turning off your service due to non-payment".

I'm standing by what I said, the customer is paying for their internet service and it's wrong for any ISP to throttle a particular site that the customer wants to use.

I know this topic has been beaten to death here, but I see it the same way you do. Verizon customers pay a toll (their monthly charge for internet access) to use Verizon's connection to the internet as a whole. No Verizon customer should have their data throttled no matter what site they are accessing as long as they are in compliance with Verizon's TOS.

Anonymous coward complex, you have it.

Just another quality product "Made In China"

Ok, I understand your point. I'm just saying that fewer drives are easier to manage. You are almost certainly right that at least initially the price per gigabyte of the 5TB drives will be somewhat higher than the average 2TB, 3TB or 4TB drives and there are possible unknown reliability issues which is why I'd wait 6 months to a year for the price to come down and the reliability to be determined. At the moment based on the prices of Western Digital Green drives on Amazon (here in the U.S. and in dollars), 2TB drives work out to .0445 cents per gigabyte, 3TB drives .03822 cents and 4TB drives .0419975 cents. So yes, 3TB drives are the cheapest per gigabyte but a price differential of .0036675 cents per gigabyte is almost inconsequential and fewer 4TB drives rather than more 3TB drives is just easier to manage. Also in terms of reliability and warranty I would much prefer to use Western Digital Black drives which in my experience are more reliable than the green drives and in the 4 cases of failure I've run into 3 of the 4 were replaced under this drives 5 year warranty versus the two year warranty of the green series drives which I've had at least 5 out of warranty failures. But black drives are significantly more expensive than the green drives, right now prices seem to be 2TB .071475 cents per gigabyte, 3TB .068656 and 4TB .06759 (so in black drives the 4TB works out to the lowest per gigabyte cost) which makes the 4TB black drive about 61% more than the 4TB green drive which is just too expensive for drives used to archive data no matter that you get 3 additional years of warranty.

I didn't mean to imply that you were disagreeing with me so sorry if it seemed like it :-) I really just wanted to explain my situation and the use of these high capacity drives in my environment. Most of my desktop computers have two internal SATA drives (usually 2 X 2TB Black) and usually I have four to six unused internal SATA connectors in anyone of my workstations.

I was about to post "Imagine how much they could make if they did things right" but you kinda stole my line :-)

Nope, I mostly use these bigger drives for backups and data archiving using external USB 3 hard drive docks. So for every 10 4TB drives you would have you could have 8 5TB drives, two drives less for every 40 TB of data; doesn't really save as much space on the shelf versus 2TB / 4TB but still some people would say less is more.

Reliability is also a concern and as you say I would wait and see the general reliability from first adopters before staring to invest in these 5TB drives.

Thanks for explaining, I wonder how long it will take from the time they release the five platter version to a four platter release? I also have to question the wisdom of pushing a version onto the market just to get it there that has a potentially higher failure rate. There was some discussion on Amazon about a 4tb Seagate drive where the poster was saying something like "You don't want to get the five platter version, get the four platter version but the model number is the same for both and the only way to tell the difference is by some obscure code that's part of the serial number." so I wonder when they go from a five platter version to a four how will anyone actually know that unless it's a different model? I mean what are people going to do, order one then check the serial and say oops five platter version and send it back and try another reseller; I mean that's messed up.

Yeah, I read that but as a number of people here have said in their posts in this topic they're experience is that Seagate has a higher failure rate than Western Digital and that's pretty much been my experience so I'll hold out for the Western Digital.

Also there was a thread I read on some forum that the first 5TB Western Digital drives will be five platters and one poster suggested that it would be better to wait for a four platter version as he seemed to think for some reason that a five platter drive had a greater chance of failure or problems than a four platter drive but he didn't elaborate. Don't know if I really believe that or not so I may wait a few months after they're released to see what people's experience is. I'm sure I can get by on some more 4TB drives until any kinks are worked out in the initial release.

Are you sure about 5TB drives being available on Amazon for a couple hundred dollars? I didn't think Western Digital had released those yet and their website shows 4TB as the max capacity for their Green, Black and Red series drives and Amazon doesn't have any listings for 5TB drives? If they are available can you share a link?

If the NSA had actually tapped the fiber between Google and Yahoo's data centers and the internet without their knowledge and this actually turned out to be true after they investigated would either company actually publicly say "After an investigation we have found the NSA has been tapping our fiber without our knowledge and we are taking steps to stop this"? I think that highly unlikely and if anything even if this was true Google and Yahoo would continue to issue denials that this had ever happened or that it was possible.

That's not the point I was trying to make, what I was trying to point out is that one of the main heroes (Anaken) ends up being corrupted and made into one of the major villains which is not an uplifting storyline. In Titanic we know that the ship is going to sink but what we don't know is that the hero will sacrifices himself to save his great love. You can't compare the two, they are completely different if Titanic took the turn that Revenge of the Sith did then Jack would have thrown Rose out of the life raft and let her die to save himself.

That's a very skewed view of what happened in the prequel series. In fact the legitimate government was subverted by one senator who plotted and created events to discredit the current Supreme Chancellor with the aim to be named as his replacement. Then in that position Palpatine continued to consolidate his power and basically lead a coup to make himself a military dictator. I don't know how you can say that the Old Republic was a theocracy since not everyone was a Jedi and the Jedi were tasked with upholding the law not forcing their own religion on everyone else. A quote from episode 4 "For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic".

I always felt that the original trilogy was a better story (and better written), underdog heroes fighting a massively superior enemy and the story of the rebirth of the Jedi and their fight against the sith. I felt that the prequels on the other hand were poorly written and they didn't mesh properly with the original three movies, there were severe continuity issues. Some of the characters were utterly ridiculous, such as the much reviled (and deservedly so) Jar Jar Binks and we all knew that our heroes and the Republic were going to lose and the Empire was going to be born. Who wants to watch a series of movies where the hero is going to go over to the dark side and the bad guys win, everyone knew essentially what was going to happen and where the story would end.

I realize the average person may say "So what?" to Microsoft raising the price on that particular product because it's targeted at a very specific market that's neither home nor your average business. But as a business practice I would say it's similar to a bank raising the prices of their safe deposit boxes or increasing the fee's on their checking accounts by 30%. It's bad business because the customers will feel you are extorting them and taking advantage of them and it will slow adoption and discourage new customers and make existing customers look for more cost effective alternatives, way better to cut the price by 10% or give other incentives and sell twice at much product and thereby make more revenue than you would have by the price increase alone. Keep in mind there's more than just the up front income from selling the product, some business would also buy software assurance or support contracts so the more of the product you sell the more of these other services you sell as well certainly increasing income in the long run by more than what you would gotten from that obnoxious price increase. It's these kinds of bad decisions that are running Microsoft into the ground.

BTW I'm glad I gave you a good laugh ;-)