Almost every week on OWC/Transintl, the price on the ram is dropping. For $368, you can get 16 gigs of ram (32 gigs for $1200 exactly).

Maybe I sound like I'm asking if you guys could predict the future, but is the price going to stall at one point or possibly go back up?

Last year I bought 2 gigs of ram for $190, I can get 8 gigs for the EXACT same price now.

I'm going to upgrade the HDD in my BlackBook and am debating between getting a 500GB 5400rpm drive or a 320GB 7200rpm drive.

OWC has the following deals for the drives and an external FW400/USB2.0 enclosure for my old drive:

DIY Upgrade Bundle: 500GB Seagate Momentus 5400RPM 2.5" SATA HD 8MB Cache, OWC On-The-Go FW400/USB 2.0 Kit for $177.99

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/DIYST500M6F4/

DIY Upgrade Bundle: 320GB Seagate Momentus 7200RPM 2.5" SATA HD 16MB Cache, OWC On-The-Go FW400/USB 2.0 Kit for $159.99

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/9320421ASUF4/

I know there's a big difference in speed and cache sizes and I'm going to notice a huge jump in storage space either way since my BlackBook only has an 80GB drive right now. I assume it's a 5400rpm with 8MB cache and that's been working for me for the last two years so I'm leaning on getting the bigger drive.

Any thoughts?

I'm trying to build a bullet-proof backup system for my Macbook Pro on a modest budget and need some technical advice for choosing which hard drive to put in an external firewire enclosure. (OWC Mercury Elite-AL Quad-interface [Firewire 800/400, USB, eSata])

This is not the oft-repeated question of "Which HDD brand is the most reliable?" We should all know by now that all hard drives will fail sooner or later and it's the backup strategy that should keep you up at night.

I've got the backup strategy nailed down (redundant copies of my laptop HDD and external HDD, plus off-site backup), and I've figured out I need a 750 GB or 1 TB SATA drive. The question is, which HDDs have performance and power-usage specs that make the best sense for an external backup drive that will only get written to for a nightly backup with SuperDuper plus occasional Time Machine writes in the background when I'm at my desk?

Tom's Hardware Winter 2008 Hard Drive Guide gives a great technical look at today's top drives from WD, Seagate, Hitachi and Samsung. I don't know how to read these numbers (like average sequential read throughput or access time) to know what's relevant to my backup situation. Tom's Hardware also gives metrics on performance per watt, and another article highlights low-power-consumption as an important consideration for always-on externals.

What metrics matter for backup-only drives? Should I go for so-called RAID class drives that are certified for 24/7 grinding? Should I go for one of these "green" drives that are low-performance but low power consumers? What's good for the long haul?