Optical Storage
As bland as the Optical Storage market was last month, this month is even worse. Both best of breed drives, the NEC 3540 and the BenQ DW1640, come in just under $45 shipped. Now that the NEC 3540A [RTPE: ND-3540A] has matured a bit the drive is very attractive. The BenQ DW1640 [RTPE: BenQ DW1640], on the other hand, performed well in our recent 16X DVDR roundup. We are keeping our eye on some other drives, like the Plextor 740A as well, but no one can touch NEC or BenQ right now as far as quality and price is concerned; 8X DVD+DL works just fine on the newest Verbatim media in our lab.
Pioneer also quietly unveiled their DVR-110D [RTPE: Pioneer DVR-110]. Although Pioneer used to be the DVD-R champion many years ago, they are not really in the same position to recapture the market from the likes of NEC; particularly when NEC can undercut everyone (including Lite-On) on component cost. We also started to track HP's LightScribe units over the last few weeks, the HP DVD640I [RTPE: Q6766A]. Without much competition, LightScribe drives will continue to be much too expensive to warrant a recommendation from AnandTech, but since NEC is due to release a LightScribe drive in the next few weeks we might actually see some healthy competition in that field. Until then, I have a Sharpie...
Sony also has a new drive on the way, the DRU-810A. Expect a review of this drive and many more in the near future at AnandTech! Stay tuned next week for more recommendations and hot deals!
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zemane - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
Kristopher: About the RTPE graph, could the y axis be on multiples of 5, e.g., 5, 10, 15; or 20, 30, 40; or 150, 250, 350, etc.I feel this is more intuitive and helps getting a quick idea of how prices or volume are changing.
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
I'll try my best.Kristopher
huges84 - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
I just bought a Seagate 7200.8 250GB SATA drive for my computer becuase it was so quiet in the computer that I built for my brother. My old 120GB Maxtor 6Y120L0 was the loudest part of my computer.With the Seagates you can't even hear them in either computer unless you put your ear right next to that part of the case. Now I actually have to look at the HDD activity light to know when my harddrive is busy. And the speed is amazing.
I would definitely recommend that anyone who thinks they could use a new drive not hesitate and jump on it. The improvement is well worth it, especially since the harddrive can be the biggest bottleneck in any modern system.
PrinceGaz - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
Pretty much any decent new hard-drive these days has fluid dynamic bearings, so all of them from any manufacturer are a lot quieter than drives of a few years ago.The prices of both PATA and SATA drives up to 250GB or so, is so cheap now there's no reason to opt for anything less. Even if you're only likely to use 100GB or less, having a larger drive that costs only slightly more will give higher performance as all the data will be on the outside of the disk giving higher transfer rates and reduced seek-times.
Hard drives are an absolute bargain these days imo.
SpaceRanger - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
Would like to see them start adding Notebook HD's in there as well.huges84 - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
agreedCZroe - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
Retail has always been the best way to purchase hard drives so I really don't see the point of this guide. Fry's had the Raptor 36GB drive for $69 after rebate this past week. Best Buy had the WD1200JB 120GB drives for $19.99 after rebate and I've been buying them for that cheap for years now (They show up every few weeks). I've gotten four 7k400 400GB drives from Fry's for $179.99ea with NO tax. Even Office Depot and Office Max have MUCH better prices. These price guides are only useful if you can't do anything else but purchase immediately and you have no local electronics stores.bdoney - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
Nice price guide, and it's useful but it would be nice to have rebate information on there. I just picked up two WD 160GB drives at a local electronic store chain. The price was $120 each with $80 of rebates for each drive. With pricing like that, I can't see buying any other hard drive unless you REALLY want the cutting edge.huges84 - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
The price guides have never been about rebates, because you are still paying $120 for the drive. You cannot get that drive if you only have $40. Yes, when all is said and done 8 weeks (or more) later, you may or may not get $80 back. But even then you will have lost that purchasing power for a while and lost all possinbility of interest on that money.Besides, the price guides are all about finding good components at the best (relativley) dependable prices. You should be able to read a price guide from two weeks ago on motherboards and the recommendations should still be mostly the same as they would be right this second. Afterall, the priceguides for every category aren't redone every week.
But of course rebates still offer low prices, and some people have no problem with them. (I don't like them but it doesn't mean I won't jump on a really great deal). For those people, there are the forums where people can post hot deals. Also, I would suggest you checkout the best place for hot deals: BensBargains.net That place is all about the absolute best prices.
PrinceGaz - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
Splitting the HD price tables into seperate sections depending on capacity is good, but there's a slight glitch. In the 400GB tables, 40GB drives are showing up as well. I guess a little more tweaking is needed of the algorithm used to select them.I picked up a Maxtor MaxLine III 250GB SATA drive last week which I've been very impressed with so far. You have the drive listed in the SATA section rather than SATA II, but according to Maxtor the drive has
SATA II features, including:
- Native command queuing
- Hot plug
- Staggered spin-up
- Asynchronous signal recovery
so the MaxLine III drives probably belong in the SATA II section.