Introduction

Alright, so we’re half way through October now, getting closer and closer to payday, which means that hopefully, you have some spending money left over! This Price Guide follows hot on the heels of our latest Budget Buyer's Guide. While that may seem like too many "guides" at the same time, we really view these as tools for you, the reader. Our Buyer's Guides start with a budget and we try to fit several complete systems into that budget, whereas the Price Guides focus on a specific component. We can't go into tons of detail in the Buyer's Guides without creating a bloated article, but we can look at all of the alternatives for a component here.

Be sure to check out our Real-Time Price Engine for up-to-the-hour prices and rebates on all of the products that you’re looking into purchasing, including hard drives. We’ve also updated our RTPE and have a new bot that crawls UPCs, component specifications and manufacturers' URLs. You can now search the RTPE by entering a UPC code, which makes finding products for which you’re looking faster and easier. It also notifies you of the percentage of tax that may be applicable based on the state in which you reside and how much the component costs. (Note that if you're going through a corporate firewall, the state may be incorrect.)

We have a few new updates for this weekend, including Seagate’s ninth generation 7200.9 drives that were recently introduced this past Monday. We’ve also noticed a greater number of SAS drives making their way further into the hard drive market, but whether or not they’re worth the investment is still up for debate. Let's begin with what is the most interesting segment, the SATA II/3.0Gbps drives.



SATA - 3.0Gbps

SATA drives in the 3.0Gbps category have gone up about $0.02/GB since our last analysis two weeks ago. It seems as though the 250GB hard drives are still the “best bang for the buck” at the moment with the 250GB Hitachi Deskstar [RTPE: T7K250] leading the competition at $0.44 per GB. Coming in close behind is the Western Digital 250GB Caviar SE [RTPE: WD2500KS] at $0.45 per GB. The prices on most drives are also trending down at a steady rate, with the WD drive dropping about $1 per week.

Those interested in the fastest access times will benefit from the 10,000 RPM of the WD Raptor. The Raptors often fluctuate quite a bit in price, with an overall slow drop as time passes. Although they are not much cheaper than our last analysis, at least one vendor still has a $20 mail-in rebate. The best price that we can find this week is for $166 shipped, or $152 if you're willing to wait for the MIR.

Western Digital 1.5Gbps 74GB 10000RPM 8MB Raptor

The new Seagate 7200.9 SATA drives have only been available for a week (and many models are still on pre-order), but a few are already starting to come down in price. We noticed that the 500GB Seagate Barracuda [RTPE: ST3500641AS] has dropped over $20 in just one week, and clearly, prices have not yet stabilized. Currently at $0.75 per GB or $377 total, the drive is very expensive, but there really isn't a lot of competition in the half TB market yet. If size matters to you, be prepared to shell out more money, similar to the 10K RPM "tax" on the WD Raptor. Worth noting is that the 500GB model does have a 16MB cache, so performance should be better than most other SATA drives. The cheapest 7200.9 SATA drive that our RTPE is showing is the Seagate 160GB Barracuda [RTPE: ST3160812AS] at $0.58 per GB, which is quite a bit higher than competing drives. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out on the 7200.9 drives for the next coming weeks and see how they fair.





SATA – 1.5Gbps

The real world difference in performance between SATA 3.0Gbps and SATA 1.5Gbps is difficult to gauge. In our initial tests, it was faster in some applications and slower in others. Depending on price and other features, SATA 1.5Gbps drives are still worth purchasing. We have a fairly nice deal on a Maxtor 160GB with a 16MB cache [RTPE: 6B250S0] for $0.40 per GB, totaling $99.00 shipped. Maxtor's drives aren't necessarily the quietest out there, but performance of the 16MB cache models is very good. Nevertheless, we’ve witnessed a steady decline in price with this particular Maxtor hard drive, which you can clearly see from this chart:

Maxtor 1.5Gbps 250GB 7200RPM 16MB DiamondMax 10

Presently, the 250GB SATA drives are hovering in the vicinity of $0.40 per GB, which is a bit cheaper than SATA II models. The least expensive model is the Maxtor MaxLine Plus II 8MB drive, but we'd avoid that particular drive. It's noisier than the newer Maxtor DiamondMax 10, and it doesn't have 16MB of cache.



We found that TigerDirect is running a $60 rebate on the Seagate 300GB Barracuda [RTPE: ST3300831AS], bringing the price down to $103.00 shipped. With the rebate, that gives an incredible cost of just $0.34/GB, though it's only a mediocre $0.51/GB without the MIR. The Seagate drives are well regarded in the computing community and come with a standard 5-year warranty, and this is the cheapest price that we’ve seen on this drive. You also get NCQ, so the only thing that you're missing relative to the 7200.9 model is support for higher burst rates and more cache.

Seagate 1.5Gbps 300GB 7200RPM 8MB Barracuda 7200.8

PATA

This week's best deal on a PATA drive is a 250GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 [RTPE: 6L250R0] with 16MB cache at $0.38 per GB. We've observed a significant price drop with this drive over the past several months, and it continues to drop an average of $2 per week. The 300GB drives are going for about $0.42 per GB and the best deals are on the drives that have a 16MB cache; well worth the few extra cents per GB for twice the cache if you plan on using the drive for something other than a fileserver.

Maxtor ATA100 250GB 7200RPM 16MB DiamondMax 10

The largest drop in price this week was in the 120GB drives. We noticed drops anywhere from $0.61 to $22, although the cheapest price per GB is still only at $0.54. Specifically, the 120GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 [RTPE: HDS722512VLAT20] is currently at its lowest price that we've seen. For those with older PCs that may not have SATA connections, PATA performance is still acceptable. The cables are somewhat unwieldy and you still have to deal with master and slave settings, but prices for many PATA drives are slightly lower than their SATA counterparts.





SCSI

At near its all-time low price, the Seagate 147GB Ultra320 10K.6 [RTPE: ST3146807LW] comes in as the cheapest price per GB at $2.33. The 10K.7 drives are averaging $3.28 per GB with the “best bang for the buck” being the Seagate 73GB Ultra320 at $2.85 a GB in both the 80-pin [RTPE: ST373207LC] and 68-pin [RTPE: ST373207LW] flavors. Both the 80- and 68-pin drives are at their all-time low of $200, though they're still about $40 more than the WD Raptor, and that's not including the cost of a SCSI controller card.

Seagate Ultra320 73GB 10000RPM 8MB Cheetah 10K.7 80-pin

Seagate Ultra320 147GB 10000RPM 8MB Cheetah 10K.6 68-pin

Regarding the new SAS drives, just like our last hard drive guide, we still don’t recommend them. They’re still very expensive, and while you have the cheaper option of going with a 10,000 RPM SATA, why would you want to? Currently, there is no true advantage of SAS over SCSI, and if SAS were to replace anything, it would have to be fiber channel in order for you to even begin to see the equivalence. As of now, Maxtor is the only manufacturer who is marketing these drives. They start at $3.18 per GB and go up to $6.36 per GB, basically coming in 15% higher than SCSI at best.







DVDR

We'll conclude with some coverage of the optical drives. DVDRs have become extremely cheap now and are one of the best ways to back up your data. The NEC ND-3540A [RTPE: ND-3540A] continues to top the price charts, going for just under $39.00 shipped. You can also see that this DVDR is being sold at the lowest price that we've yet seen, although week-to-week and even day-to-day fluctuations can be $5 or more.

NEC 16X ND-3540A

For just under $5.00 more than the ND-3540, you can pick up the BenQ DW1640 [RTPE: DW1640] for about $44.00 shipped. Since our last guide, the NEC DVDR went down a few dollars more than the BenQ. Though both are excellent drives, this isn't the cheapest that we have seen the BenQ. We're still waiting for NEC to release their new drive with the LabelFlash feature. LabelFlash, which was introduced by Yamaha back in 2002, will be competing with HP's Lightscribe and is said to be faster with a higher quality image labeling system.

Besides the BenQ and NEC drives, Pioneer, LG, Toshiba, and Lite-On all have competing products, but features and performance are so close that there's little reason to spend even $5 more. The only drive that stands out from the list with something extra is the LG [RTPE: LGA-4163B], as it supports 5X DVD-RAM. We don't use it, but some of you might need the feature. Plextor is often regarded as the king of optical drives, and they have a price to match. The PX-740A [RTPE: PX-740A] is really just a rebadged BenQ DW1540, but at a $35 premium. The PX-716A [RTPE: PX-716A], on the other hand, costs nearly three times as much as the NEC, so unless you have overwhelming brand loyalty to Plextor, you should save your money.