Introduction

Unfortunately, many of the drives in this November 2005 edition of our storage price guide have remained near the same price range as in our last edition. As we get closer and closer to the holiday season, we're confident to say that you will find some exceptional deals in the coming editions - after all, Black Friday is only a week away!

Although they are still outrageously priced, many more SAS drives have been released into the market. For you SATA users, we have some good news. The 3.0Gbps drives have reached approximately the same price as to the 1.5Gbps drives, making them generally a better buy. Higher quality DVDRs have become a must have these days for any new rig, be sure to read through our guide as you may find something that you were looking for.

And how can we forget, bookmark our RTPE system page at http://labs.anandtech.com/; the only system that will bring you up to the minute prices for much of your hardware component needs without any bias.

To start off our guide, we'll take a look at how the newer SATA 3.0Gbps drives are fairing.

SATA - 3.0Gbps

We're not seeing much of any price fluctuations this week with the SATA 3.0Gbps drives. A few have gone up and a few have gone down, but nothing too significant. The best bang for the buck this week is going to have to be the 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 7200RPM with 16MB of cache [RTPE: WD2500KS] and you'll also see this drive has had a small price reduction of $16, brining the total to $109.00 shipped.

If you're looking for more drive space, the 500GB Seagate Barracuda (7200.9) 7200RPM with 16MB of cache [RTPE: ST3500641AS] is down $7.00 for a grand total of $350.00 shipped, about $0.70 per GB. However, you would be saving $132.00 if you were to go with two of the WD drives we recommended above rather than a single 500GB Seagate. Our opinion? Save your $132.00 and go with two of the WD's instead.

If you would take a look at the graph below, you can see the 500GB Seagate has been on a healthy decline since it was initially released. We're expecting it to drop a bit more before it steadies out.

Seagate 3.0Gbps 500GB 7200RPM 16MB Barracuda 7200.9

Not all of us need that kind of density, so if you're looking for something basic, we suggest you don't go with any drive lower than an 80GB. Any lower, and you will be spending too much money per GB. We suggest the 80GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K80 (7200RPM, 8MB cache) [RTPE: HDS728080PLA380] for about $57.00.

We're noticing the price of the 1.5Gbps SATA drives are especially close to the 3.0Gbps drives. So if you're lucky enough to have a motherboard which supports SATA 3.0, you're set. It's definitely difficult for us to recommend a 1.5Gbps drive because of the prices being so close, but if that's what your motherboard supports, then your best bang for the buck drive would be the 200GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (7200RPM, 8MB cache) [RTPE: 6L200M0] for about $86.00.

We would like to point out that as with our last guide, it seems as though TigerDirect is still running a rebate on the 300GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 [RTPE: ST3300831AS] going for about $95.00 after a $50 MIR.

You may also want to consider the 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE (7200RPM, 8MB cache) [RTPE: WD2500JD] for just about $101.00 shipped, that's about $0.40 per GB.

Again, nothing too noteworthy with these prices either. But we would like to remind you to be sure to pick up a drive with at least 8MB's of cache rather than one with only 2MB's of cache. We're positive that you will notice a larger boost in performance with any model with over 2MB of cache.

Your best bet is to go with the 250GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 with 16MB of cache [RTPE: 6L250R0] which is at a fair price of just under $100.00; still this is not the lowest price we've seen this drive at, but something you should consider.

The new Maxtor DiamondMax 16 and the Samsung SpinPoint P drives have yet to hit retail stores. At the moment, they're still on pre-order only.

On the SCSI Ultra320 front, the best priced drive is currently the 147GB Maxtor 10,000RPM (8MB cache) [RTPE: 8D147J0] on sale for about $387.00. This drive has seen a price decrease of about $30.00 and as you can see from the graph below, it has been dropping in price every couple of weeks.

Maxtor Ultra320 147GB 10000RPM 8MB Atlas 10K V 80-pin

The new SAS drives are still extremely expensive; ranging from anywhere between about $225 for a 36.7GB, 15,000RPM drive to about $1340 for a 146GB, 15,000RPM drive.

The best price we can find at the moment would be the either the 147GB Maxtor 10,000RPM with 16MB of cache [RTPE: 8D147S0] or the 73.4GB Maxtor 10,000 RPM with 16MB of cache [RTPE: 8D073S0]. Both going for about $3.00 per GB.

We would like to conclude this month's storage guide with our outlook on optical drives. DVDRs are extremely cheap now and are a great way to create backups for your system. With all builds, you want to have at least one optical drive, so we suggest you look into a DVD+/-RW to cover all of your optical necessities. You will be able to burn both DVDs, CDs, and be able to read them as well.

Our two favorite drives are the NEC 16X ND-3540A [RTPE: ND-3540A] and the BenQ 16X DW1640 [RTPE: DW1640] both on sale for about $43.00 shipped. Between the two, we found the BenQ DW1640 to be the better performer, which you can read more about in Purav's Summer 2005 16x DVDR Roundup. Besides these two drives, we also recommend other brands like Lite-On, LG and Plextor. Lite-On, LG, NEC and BenQ are in the same price ballpark, but at the moment, your best option is to go with the NEC or BenQ only because of the pricing. On the other hand, Plextor is always the most expensive of the bunch and one we don't recommend because of that. These all perform very close to each other, so we suggest the cheapest one you can find at the moment.