Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1675
Introduction
Hopefully, everyone has had a chance to take a look at our in-depth analysis of the newest Seagate Barracuda drives a couple weeks ago. If NCQ hasn't swayed you yet, it should soon with the onset of next generation NCQ controllers and multiple core processors. This week, we also saw the unveiling of SATA II drives, (3.0Gbps, U300) and the ever so hyped "Hybrid" hard drives. While Hybrid drives may be vaporware, SATA II devices are here now, at least in preorder form. Although Samsung made the initial announcement, Hitachi drives are on ETA at most of the major vendors right now. We will touch on this a little bit later on.As far as vendor news goes, there were two major announcements this week. The first was the merger of GameVE with iBuyPower. iBuyPower has been around for years as one of the major Taiwanese distributers/system builders, and it was only a matter of time before they eventually acquired a retail component channel as well. You may recall that the other distributors moved into the retail channel with stores like Ewiz.com (MA Labs) and EEbuy.com (Mighty Micro). In any case, it's good to see a vendor and a distributor working so closely together as this will ultimately lead to lower costs, and lower prices.
We originally ignored ChiefValue.com last year when they exploded onto the retail channel. Now that they have a little bit of experience under their belt, we are pretty impressed with their pricing and service. For those of you who don't know, ChiefValue is integrally affiliated with the omnipresent merchant-turned-distributor NewEgg (both merchants ship from the same California warehouse). ChiefValue tends to put free shipping on more items than the NewEgg channel, but who are we to complain?!
Finally, for those who like to work with our beta search engine (which officially comes out of beta this summer), we added a few nice little features over the last couple of weeks. On certain product searches, you will notice that we denote mail-in rebates separately (here is an example) and do not include them in the shipped price like some of our so-called competitor price engines. We've added nearly 400 new products in the last month alone as well.
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
Parallel ATA Hard Drives
The differences between SATA II and SATA may be minimal, but SATA still beats PATA hands down with the occasional exception of price. Things have changed a lot over the last couple of months and there are still deals here and there, but SATA is becoming more predominant everyday. As you'll notice below, except for the first few drives, the cost per GB (particularly on larger sized drives) is the same or better on SATA.It's starting to get hard for us to list prices on certain drives (such as the sub 80GB units) since the cost ratio is so poor. In fact, buying any sub 80GB PATA drive seems quite silly since every unit costs the same anyway, but the 80GB drives obviously pack more space. We may consider phasing these drives out in the next iterations of the price guides.
The old adage used to be that you bought a PATA drive if you just wanted space, and didn't care about the speed. Things have changed a bit over the last year, although occasionally, PATA is cheaper for purely raw data storage. We still don't recommend going all out on 300GB or 400GB drives just yet, although the price has come down considerably (more so on the SATA variants). Seagate's 7200.8 [RTPE: Seagate 7200.8] series and Hitachi's 7K400 [RTPE: Hitachi 7K400] series stand together as the only real 400GB solutions right now, and the price per GB is not great either. Prices have been on the decline - it just makes more sense to spend the extra few dollars on the NCQ-ready SATA versions of both of these drives. Below, you can see the price details on the Hitachi 400GB Deskstar [RTPE: HDS7240KLAT80], which dropped almost $50 in price since our last guide:
Hitachi ATA100 400GB 7200RPM 8MB Deskstar 7K400
Maxtor ATA100 250GB 7200RPM 8MB MaXLine Plus II
SCSI Drives
Below, you can check out our breakdown of each SCSI drive per GB. Not all of the SCSI products available are listed, but some of the newer Seagate 15K.4 drives are included as a point of reference.Most likely, the people who need to buy a 15,000RPM SCSI drive have very little desire to scrape a dollar here or a dollar there by analyzing the current cost per GB (when CDW has the lowest price on a product, you know it's not your John Q public type of component). However, it is very interesting to see that the price on some of the more affordable SCSI drives is actually very competitive with some of the high end SATA Raptors. Whether or not you'd rather have two tiny Raptors in a RAID 0 configuration compared to one large Raptor is almost a matter of religion, but a 73GB Fujitsu 10RPM drive over a more expensive 73GB Raptor is surely a no brainier, if you have the bus capability, that is.
There has been some talk about 15,000RPM SATA II drives on the horizon; we may even see some demonstrations in time for Computex this year. The 15,000RPM Seagate 15K.4 drives are all over the place now, albeit at a price that is a little out of our reach. High performance SATA II 15,000RPM drives would certainly prove an interesting alternative to SCSI, but such drives would probably be marketed at a steeper price than a similar SCSI drive, much the same way that Western Digital Raptors are priced worse than the equivalent SCSI drive.
DVDR Drives
According to our discussions with the product managers, the ninth generation DVDR drives are about to start phasing out in favor of the 10th generation units. BenQ actually already began to phase out their 16X DW160 [RTPE: BenQ DW1620] in favor of the dual layer, dual format 16X DW165 [RTPE: BenQ DW1625], although the only real performance boost is 4X dual layer burning opposed to 2.4X (something that the Pioneer DVR-109 [RTPE: Pioneer DVR-109] and the NEC 3520A [RTPE: NEC 3520A] have done for some time). The next generation drives will really only improve in media support and will probably be the equivalent of releasing new BIOS.So, buy now? Of course. With prices so ridiculously cheap, it's really a "no brainer" at this point. When merchants are fighting over every last penny on a sub $50 drive, you know that the technology has hit the maturity stage. Let's take a look at the pricing on our personal favorite, the NEC 3520A:
We also like the LG GSA-416 [RTPE: GSA-4163B] and the Pioneer DVR-109 [RTPE: DVR-109], but now, when we start seeing cost differences upwards of $10 (20%), it becomes easier and easier to recommend the NEC unit.
The ninth generation LiteOn also dropped in price over the last few weeks, but at this point, all of the units are so similar (with the exception of the DVD-RAM capable LG) that choosing one over another becomes less important. When these were $200 burners, there were several small differences that we could analyze between the drives and thus, pick a winner; but now with most of the drives based on the same build specifications, right down to the servo, with costs all within a buck or two, pretty much choosing any unit guarantees you a winner. Stay tuned next week for more guides including a demystifying "how to buy an AMD processor and get what you want" guide!
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