Serial ATA Hard Drives
Like our other storage price guides, the standard approach for choosing the best hard drive since the beginning of the hard drive has been to calculate the cost per gigabyte of the hard drive; what gives the most storage for the buck. Cache sizes and spin speed aside, most hard drives are created equally enough that 1GB of Brand A still equates to 1GB of Brand B. Just to get started, we compiled a short list of most Serial ATA drives on the market today and their relative cost per GB; lower is better.Keep in mind, our price engine constantly updates the prices on products, but the table above reflects the cost per GB of products that we listed on May 6th, 2005. For those who like to gamble on mail-in rebates, there are actually some better prices out there particularly through Fry's and Buy.com. The sweet spot for SATA drives clearly appears to be the 250GB range, with the most competitive alternative - the 200GB drives. This is more or less on par with the same price trends a few weeks ago during our last guide, although all drives have dropped at least 4 cents per GB.
The huge announcement over the last few weeks was the launch of SATA II drives. These SATA II drives, which we denote as U300, are actually extremely competitive per GB compared to some of the other drives available. Giving SATA II drives the moniker of U300 (300Mbps) is slightly incorrect as SATA II drives can also operate at U150 speeds as well. However, all drives that we know of will use the U300 speed bus and we will continue to differentiate it this way until SATA I drives obtain U300 speeds (which seems unlikely) or SATA II drives start to utilize U150 speeds (which also seems unlikely). For those really interested in a fun conjecture between the way that products should be named, take a look at SATA's webpage on the topic (which is not called SATA-IO). Politics aside, we've highlighted these new drives in bold in the cost per GB breakdown above. As of time of publication, availability on SATA II drives was very limited; ZipZoomFly and Mwave appear to be the only merchants with any availability on Hitachi drives - and Samsung SATAII drives just came out of preorder on Monarch Computer at that time of publication. Below, you can see what the RTPE scraped together on SATA II drives this week:
Of course, the debate still rages if SATA II really holds a significant advantage over SATA I. We have a few analyses in the works that give a complete breakdown of real world speeds with both SATAs pitted against each other, but the reality of hard drives is that the bottleneck is not the bus, but the mechanics of the drive itself. 3Gbps SATA is backwards compatible with SATA 1.5Gbps. Anyone who has played with a SATA device before knows that the largest problem with the technology is the awful interface cable. SATA II supposedly fixes this problem a little by adding a retention clip to the cable interface, which some manufacturers have been doing anyway. From our talks with manufacturers, it appears as though SATA II will completely replace SATA I very soon and very quickly, but since the only changes are a retention clip and an imaginary increase in bus speed, we will leave the final word to the upcoming reviews. There is only a dollar or two premium on SATA II right now, which makes it a fairly reasonable buy, but don't expect miracles for performance.
On the other hand, there are some who claim that the 3Gbps interface lives up to all that it claims. We will have more details very soon!
It's always great to see SATA drive prices drop, and the last two months have certainly seen their share of price cuts on SATA devices. The current cost per GB leader, the Western Digital 250GB Caviar SE [RPTE: WD2500JD] recently just dropped to about $125, down from $140 two months ago. Even the OEM versions of this drive come with a three-year warranty as well. Below, you can see the price trend on this drive:
Western Digital U150 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Caviar SE
Seagate U150 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Barracuda 7200.8
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zemane - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
#13:Thanks for the info Kristopher!
knightspawn1138 - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
I'd like to see the Storage price guide include USB Flash drives (and USB thumb-drive mini-hard drives). Now that these drives are closing in on DVD's for storage size, they should be treated similar to the rest of the storage media. I for one would like to see a price guide for USB flash drives, since I've come to depend on a couple for use as boot disks on my PC.Doormat - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
Yea! The prices on large (>= 300GB) SATA drives are finally starting to go down. Cant wait for Seagate 300GB drives to be $150/ea - two for $300! I remember when I bought two 60GXPs for that much. Now if I could only find a good inexpensive RAID card... you guys should do a RAID-5/6 card review (raidcore, 3ware, adaptec, areca, etc). I see that other sites have them, but I really dont trust those sites...KristopherKubicki - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
zemane: I like the 3520A better, but that is mostly due to the price. The write quality on the PX716A is a little better.On the other hand, if you need features like riplock, you don't even have the opportunity to use a modified BIOS on the plextor (unlike the NEC).
Kristopher
zemane - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
How does the NEC 3520A compares to the PLEXTOR PX-716A?KristopherKubicki - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
semo: That should read DW1625. Sorry!matthewfoley: I will do my best to implement that. Right now we just list core name as part of the processor name.
Kristopher
semo - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
i think something is wrong here (or it could just be me):"BenQ actually already began to phase out their 16X DW160 [RTPE: BenQ DW1620] in favor of the dual layer, dual format 16X DW160 [RTPE: BenQ DW1625], although the only real performance boost is 4X dual layer burning opposed to 2.4X ..."
what does dw160 mean and how can it be phased out in favour of itself (or am i not getting this right?)
anyway, it should be added that the dw1625 supports lightscribe technology. it may not be considered exciting or useful by many ppl but it is still worth a mention imo.
flatblastard - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
knowflatblastard - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
Can't wait for that one, KK. I'm ready to buy one of them crazy numbered ased AMD processors anyday now....just waiting for ATI or Sapphire to get off their lazy bums and gimme the mobo/chipset that I want! I'm thinking 3500+/3800+ V or 3700+/4000+ SD. So hopefully soon I'll no more than that, hopefully ;)matthewfoley - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
Could we get some sorting capability on the RTPE? For example, on processors, I'd like to see a separate column for name, core, price, and be able to order by that column.