Price Guide, February 2006: Storage

Introduction

Welcome to our latest rendition of our Price Guides. For this week, we’ll be taking a look at pricing trends and special buys for all your storage needs from SATA drives to PATA hard drives, down to your SCSI and DVDRs. As we do with just about every other edition of our weekly Price Guides, we would like to remind our readers to look into the RTPE at http://labs.anandtech.com for just about all their computer building needs. Not only does the RTPE cover the usual products that we like to cover in our Price Guides (the hard drives, CPUs, video cards and motherboards), but it also covers your sound card, system memory (both for laptops and desktops), flash memory, and LCD monitors. If you haven’t had the chance to check it out before, feel free to do so now!

Now we’ll head into more about what this edition of our Price Guide is about - hard drives. We are noticing that hard drives have come down a few cents per GB, roughly about $0.05 or so. We’re not saying that it’s much of a decrease, but every bit helps. The SATA 3.0Gbps and 1.5Gbps drives are about even, price-wise. Either of the two would be a fine choice, as the main difference between the two is their bandwidth capabilities, and at the moment, that’s a moot point if they are not set up in a RAID array as we saw in our look at Seagate’s 160GB 7200.9 a few weeks back.

Starting off this price guide, we’ll first take a look at the 3.0Gbps drives.

SATA – 3.0Gbps

Since our last analysis, we can see that the 3.0Gbps drives have slightly decreased in price. There are a number of good deals going on, so we’ll take the time right now to make a few recommendations. First off, we have the Samsung 3.0Gbps 250GB 7200RPM 8MB SpinPoint P [RTPE: SP2504C] on sale for approximately $102. As another option, you also have the Western Digital 3.0Gbps 250GB 7200RPM 16MB Caviar SE16 [RTPE: WD2500KS] going for $104 shipped.

As an alternative to the Western Digital drive above, you have the Maxtor 3.0Gbps 250GB 7200RPM 16MB DiamondMax 10 [RTPE: 6V250F0] going for $98 plus shipping, that’s $0.42 per GB. If you’re looking for a drive with a bit more room, the Maxtor 3.0Gbps 300GB 7200RPM 16MB DiamondMax 10 [RTPE: 6V300F0] is going for $122 plus shipping, making that about $0.43 per GB.

For about $0.55 per GB, the Seagate 3.0Gbps 400GB 7200RPM 16MB Barracuda 7200.9 [RTPE: ST3400633AS] is at an all-time low. At the moment, it is going for about $222 shipped.

While we see the Seagate 3.0Gbps 500GB 7200RPM 16MB Barracuda 7200.9 [RTPE: ST3500641AS] going for about $326 shipped, we also see Maxtor’s 3.0Gbps 500GB 7200RPM 16MB DiamondMax 11 [RTPE: 6H500F0] on sale for approximately $330, breaking the cost down to $0.66 per GB.