Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1136
Price Guides August 2003 Part II: Hard Drives and Memory
by Kristopher Kubicki on September 2, 2003 3:46 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Introduction
For those of you not familiar with the guides here is a brief overview on
how we construct them:
We select vendors to appear in our Price Guides based on two requirements: solid consumer feedback and having the lowest possible pricing. You'll notice that these vendors aren't paying us to be listed here; we do not accept requests to be listed here. We have tried to eliminate vendors with low feedback rating, but we do encourage you to do your own research before purchasing from any of these vendors.
If there are any problems with the guide or a vendor's pricing changes dramatically then be sure to email the author listed at the top of the page and we'll take appropriate action. Remember that although some vendors may be cheaper, we only list those with generally positive feedback from a decent number of consumers. As usual, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to email us or post in the AnandTech Forums.
Also be sure to check out AnandTech's Hot Deals Forum for even more great CPUs, Video Cards and other technology buys.
Disclaimer
AnandTech does not endorse any vendor listed in the following price guide.
AnandTech does not sell positions on the Price Guide. AnandTech
nor any of the vendors listed in this guide guarantee the prices presented
in the following pages.
This Week
As usual, if you have any reports of incorrect prices please feel free to
email us with the name of the vendor and the product/price that appears incorrectly
on their website. This will help us produce a more useful guide in the future.
Welcome back to another new edition of the AnandTech Price Guides. In order to stay a little bit ahead of the competition, we will also start to include storage products in our price guides. We had to work some AT Staff and an intern into the ground to make sure we had IDE and Serial ATA products added for this week’s edition! Remember, the tables below are embedded in Real Time, so even though we might publish on Monday, the information is current for the week.
Serial ATA hit the mass markets about a year ago, and since then it has been an uphill struggle for the hard drive companies. Maxtor and Western Digital have done an excellent job over the last 12 months to bring large quantity SATA storage down to near-IDE prices, with the serial ATA premium running about 10-15%. (Compare this to last year when SATA drives were more than double the cost of ATA133 counterparts).
As expected, the 7200RPM drives do not perform nearly as well as their SCSI equivalents, but they do outperform ATA133 drives and carry the added advantages of the Serial ATA bus. Below is a RealTime plot of our monitored SATA products.
The Maxtor and Seagate 120GB drives both perform excellent for the cost, which is less than a dollar a gigabyte. We slightly prefer the Seagate drive over the Maxtor, but this is due to customer service and satisfaction. Thus, we have to choose the Seagate 120GB our pick of the week.
Edit: Just as we stated several months ago the Western Digital Raptor 36.7GB 10,000RPM drive performs extremely well, but with several disadvantages (Don't forget to look at the Raptor preview as well). The high pitched whine and high cost do not seem to justify the performance increases for single user applications. Remember, virtually all SATA drives come with an 8MB cache which provides an incredible boost in performance for single user applications. Disk read speed is typically slightly lower than 2MB caches, but actually IO/sec can increase as much as 25%.
The interesting thing about hard drives this week is that the 120GB drives on both IDE and SATA channels cost about the same. The mere $10 premium between Seagate’s 120GB drive seem worth it to go with the SATA version, but understandably not everyone has compatible motherboards. As you will see from our charts, the 8MB buffer costs about 10% more over 2MB cache drives, but it certainly is not a necessity. In fact, if you plan on using your drive for simple storage (like an MP3 server), you really do not even need to invest the extra money in neither 7200RPM nor 8MB cache.
We recommend grabbing a high performance 80GB drive for a new system drive (to hold the OS, games, etc) and then purchasing a slower, larger drive for storage. Maxtor’s incredibly massive 300GB hard drive debuted very recently with only 5400RPM and 2MB buffer. Although it is slow, it will run cooler and perhaps outlast two 160GB drives (while costing the same).
Memory makes everyone scratch their heads at the AnandTech labs. Attempting to price memory on a week to week basis is almost impossible – but for two solid weeks in a row DDR prices have been on the rise. Particularly, the value oriented PC2700 line costs only 5% less than high performing PC3200. It’s our best guess that PC3200 will soon be on the rise again as well.
Since PC2700 prices are up, PC3200 looks like a good blend of value and performance. Corsair takes this week’s price/performance winner, but we suspect this is due to their heavy e-commerce saturation. It is very likely that even their prices will increase over the next couple weeks.
PC4000 debuted for Mushkin and Corsair, but as Wesley recently observed, this memory unfortunately does not benefit AMD users, and the benefits for Intel system builders are only marginal. Besides, who really wants to spend an additional $80 per stick over PC3200 anyway?
That’s all for this week, but next week we should have a full lineup of SCSI hard drives to add to our IDE and SATA mix-up. If you have a particular product or category you would like us to add, feel free to click the “Comments” icon at the bottom of the article! You may also email me directly, [email protected].
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