Introduction

It's a weekend, so it looks like it's time for another price guide! In RTPE news we are working on releasing a new graphing engine soon, so don't be surprised if our graphs start looking clean and anti-aliased, instead of the awful gnuplot terminal renders we are using now. Just in time for last month's Storage Guide, we unveiled our Cost Per GB calculator, which should help you in your storage purchasing decisions. Two weeks ago we (somewhat) quietly implemented logical OR into RTPE as well. Finally, we expect to open the Beta of our price alert engine very soon; so you will be able to let RTPE contact them as new rebates and refurbs show up on products on your watch list!

Storage news has been fairly weak recently. We recently saw the introduction of perpendicular recording, along with some other tidbits on magnetic storage in general. IDF had a small tidbit about Seagate's real time encryption dubbed FDE (Full Disk Encryption). FDE sounds like the Holy Grail of laptop security; loosing your laptop means a key will still be needed for the drive to physically decrypt its data. From our IDF coverage it seemed like Seagate's FDE was very rudimentary, but this is definitely a step in the right direction to prevent things like this from becoming big problems.

"SATA II"

Well even though there is virtually no noticeable difference between SATA IO (formerly SATA II) and SATA, we will continue to cover both sections independently in the hopes that perhaps someday there might be. Hard drive prices, in general, have been very stagnant over the last few weeks. While we have seen some expected changes on the large capacity devices, the majority of drives remain pretty much at the exact same price they were at when we published our last storage guide.

Last month we talked a little bit about Western Digital's "SATA IO" offering; the WD2500KS [RTPE: WD2500KS]. We criticized the drive a bit since the $0.60 per GB rating left a lot to the imagination. However, in the last two weeks all Western Digital SATA drives reduced competitively; and the WD2500KS became one of the most cost competitive drives at $0.48 per GB. Again, the drive lacks NCQ, but as we have seen in the past NCQ implementation seems highly dependent on the manufacturer. The 16MB buffer on the WD2500KS is another benefit only a handful of SATA drives have right now (all of which come from Maxtor) and of those drives only the Western Digital supports the (in)famous 3Gbps bus. Below you can see the aggressive behavior of this drive in the retail market:

You'll also notice the addition of 500GB drives since our last Price Guide. At $0.64 per GB Hitachi isn't setting any records, unfortunately.

SATA

SATA's cost per GB fell another $0.05 this month on average; to as low as $0.43 per GB in the 250GB sector. 7200RPM PATA drives were generally about $0.42 per GB, which gives SATA narrowest margin cost per GB yet. Maxtor continues to lead the pack with its 200GB DiamondMax 10 [RTPE: 6B200M0], although there are slightly cheaper drives in the 250GB range as well. Hard drive pricing is probably one of the most predictable models as this point - particularly if the one year plot of the 6B200M0 is any measure:

Maxtor SATA 200GB 7200RPM 8MB DiamondMax 10

If you're interested in seeing the exact cost per GB (accurate to the minute), check RTPE here. Another drive that has lead the drop in cost per GB on our SATA drives is the Seagate SATA 250GB 7200.8 [RTPE: ST3250823AS] The 7200.8 isn't the cheapest 250GB drive right now, but if you click on the RTPE link and scroll down, you'll see the cost per GB is still very competitive. We have been watching this drive very closely, and again this drive takes our pick as the SATA II all around drive.

Seagate SATA 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Barracuda 7200.8

For whatever reason Western Digital always gets their own little mention for the grossly expensive, exceedingly forward thinking Raptor series [RTPE: WD Raptor]; a feat that no manufacturer has really duplicated yet. The price on these Raptor drives has remained nearly a constant $180 for almost two years, but for the first time last month we noticed a $20 rebate at some vendors bringing the price down to about $165. At this price you are still better off sticking with the Raptor over, say, a SCSI alternative since you won't need to buy a separate SCSI controller - but the gap does continue to narrow!

PATA

Most of the 250GB PATA drives ended up in the $0.46 per GB range this week, although a few of the slower 5400RPM drives managed to hover around $0.39. We actually noticed the Seagate 250GB Barracuda 7200.8 [RTPE: ST3250823A] picked up a huge rebate since our last guide, but the drive is still going to cost you $0.46 out the door; at which point you're much better off grabbing the NCQ-enabled SATA 7200.8 instead.

The largest drops this week were in the 400GB to 500GB range. We saw $4 to $10 drops on average, but the cost per GB is still above $0.55. These drives do not warrant a purchase unless you absolutely need the density. Check out the history of the rapidly moving Hitachi 400GB Deskstar 7K400 below:

Hitachi ATA100 400GB 7200RPM 8MB Deskstar 7K400

Unfortunately there isn't much else to report about PATA drives. Just keep watching the cost per GB drop.

SCSI

Apparently we jumped the gun a little bit last week when we claimed SAS drives were ready for the retail channel. SAS, or Serial Attached SCSI, is essentially the SCSI Trade Organization's counter to 3GBps SATA. Just as there is debate as to whether or not 3GBps SATA will provide any benefit over traditional 1.5GBps SATA, there is a bit of an internal struggle in the SCSI Trade Organization as for the direction of SAS too. If anything, SAS is really an alternative to fiber channel rather than a successor of SCSI or SATA. The drives are prohibitively expensive and hardly offer any real features over SCSI U320, so why become an early adopter? Anyways, the tallies are official; Maxtor made it to channel first with SAS, and we don't recommend it. If you really need SAS, you knew five years ago already.

Last month's Price Guide detailed the very few deals in the SCSI market. As we mentioned earlier, as soon as Maxtor began to push the price per GB below that of Western Digital's Raptors, WD released a semi-permanent Mail In Rebate. Obviously there are advantages in favor of SATA or SCSI, but when 10,000RPM SATA and SCSI drives cost the same, the consumer benefits. We featured Seagate's 10K.7 73GB [RTPE: ST373207LC] drive last week, but since then Maxtor's Atlas 10K V [RTPE: 8D073J0] became the most aggressively priced drive on the block; and only at a $20 out-the-door discount over Western Digital's 74GB Raptor. Check out Maxtor's recent price cuts below:

Maxtor Ultra320 73GB 10000RPM 8MB Atlas 10K V 80-pin

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!