Introduction

Thanks for joining us in our latest edition of the weekly price guides. This week, we are going to take a look at storage media, hard drives and optical devices. We'll be taking a look at the SATA drives, both the 3.0Gbps and 1.5Gbps drives, PATA drives, and both Ultra 320 and SAS SCSI drives. We've mentioned this a few times recently - the RTPE has been updated and pages load much quicker now. If you tried our RTPE a month or two ago and found it to be too slow, give it another shot. Our goal is to be able to cater to all your hardware needs, bringing you all the unbiased information that you need to score yourself the best hardware deals on the Internet. We try to include all the reputable online vendors, none of which pay us to be listed here.

Now, we'll head on to what this price guide is really about: hard drives. We have had many requests from our readers to include laptop hard drives in our storage price guides and we are going to address this request officially, here and now. Previously, our pricing engine only tracked desktop hard drives. We are actually in the process of adding laptop hard drives to the RTPE, since a large number of people use laptops these days and they, too, can also use more hard drive capacity. Once the laptop hard drives are added into the RTPE, we will begin including them in our monthly storage guides.

We are hoping to get this project completed within the next two months or so. We kindly ask you please to bear with us and keep checking to see when they are in fact listed in our storage guides. For now, we offer the following advice. Most importantly, know what your laptop can support. Most laptops still use an IDE interface, although we are starting to see SATA laptop drives in a few high-end models now. Besides the interface, you also need to consider the heat output. Generally speaking, 4200 RPM drives run cooler than most 5400 RPM drives, and the 7200 RPM drives are definitely hotter than the slower RPM models. While a nice, large 7200 RPM laptop drive might sound enticing, 5400 RPM models might be a safer bet long-term.

Other than those warnings, the primary concern will be capacity. Laptop drives are definitely more expensive than desktop drives, with even the cheapest models costing over $1/GB. Assuming that you want to purchase a new drive because your current drive is too small, we would look at the 120 GB drives. Brand isn't a huge concern of ours, and Samsung and Western Digital win out as the cheapest options, followed by Fujitsu. Seagate costs quite a bit more, and we find it hard to justify the $0.41/GB premium that's being charged. For about the same cost per GB, the 80 and 100 GB drives are also something to consider. We would only purchase a 40 GB or 60 Gigabytes drive if you are replacing a crashed hard drive and you really don't need any more capacity.

We realize that the pricing tables below and on the following pages do not allow better sorting options like the RTPE does. The main thing that you will find in the RTPE is the cost per GB breakdown. It makes finding the best storage deals extremely easy. Now, let's head on over to the next page and have a look at the 3.0Gbps SATA hard drives.



SATA - 3.0Gbps

With these 3.0Gbps drives, you can see that there are a number of outstanding deals, a few of which are actually at the lowest prices that we've seen to date. If you're trying to decide between the 3.0Gbps or 1.5Gbps drives, we suggest that you go with the drive that gives you the most storage space per dollar, and at this point in time, they seem to be fairly even, price-wise.

The obvious difference between the two is their bandwidth capabilities, with burst transfer rates being theoretically twice as fast on the newer standard. The problem is that SATA is a point-to-point protocol, so each drive gets a separate connection. Until we start seeing drives that can sustain transfer rates of over 150 GB/s, we're not going to saturate even the original SATA bandwidth. That's not to say that the newer drives aren't sometimes better, but that's largely due to increased platter densities and other tweaks as opposed to the modified SATA interface.

The best deals appear to be coming from the 250GB to 320GB drives, and are going for $0.35 to $0.45 per GB. We can see that the 320GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 with a 16MB cache [RTPE: WD3200KS] is on sale for about $121 shipped; that's roughly $0.38 per GB. You can also see from the graph below that this drive, over the course of the past few weeks, has been gradually coming down in price and is about $40 less than its initial price point.

Western Digital 3.0Gbps 320GB 7200RPM 16MB Caviar SE16

For about $0.39 per GB, the Maxtor 3.0Gbps 250GB 7200RPM 16MB DiamondMax 10 [RTPE: 6V250F0] is not at a bad price either. It's currently priced at approximately $98 shipped. Performance of Maxtor drives is quite good, but we do have to caution that they are also one of the noisier drives on the market. If you aren't trying to build a silent PC, it probably won't matter much, but quite a few of us here at AnandTech shy away from Maxtor.

Generally, going with a larger hard drive will give you more bang for your buck, but this has yet to be the case with the 400GB+ drives. The best that we can see this week is the Seagate 400GB 16MB Barracuda 7200.9 [RTPE: ST3400633AS] going for $200 shipped ($0.50 per GB). If you're in the market for an even larger drive, the Seagate 500GB 16MB Barracuda 7200.9 [RTPE: ST3500641AS] would be your best option; currently on sale for $301 shipped ($.60/GB).





SATA - 1.5Gbps

Now, we come to the 1.5Gbps hard drives. As mentioned already, these SATA hard drives have yet to even reach their 1.5Gbps bandwidth. So again, we would say that you should allow the price to be the determining factor regarding which drive you ought to buy. Worth mentioning is that not all motherboards support the higher bandwidth SATA specification, but luckily, the drives are backwards compatible.

There are also a number of excellent drives from which to choose here and we can only make so many suggestions. To start off the recommendations, we would suggest the Maxtor 1.5Gbps 300GB 7200RPM 16MB DiamondMax 10 [RTPE: 6L300S0], which is currently priced at $120 shipped, breaking it down to $0.40 per GB.

The Maxtor 1.5Gbps 250GB 7200RPM 16MB DiamondMax 10 [RTPE: 6L250S0] is another viable option. At $0.40 per GB, this hard drive is on sale for just a hair under an even $100 shipped.

If you have any doubts that most users will never notice the difference in performance between 1.5Gbps and 3.0Gbps, consider for a moment that Western Digital Raptors are all 1.5Gbps - even the new 150 GB model. Speaking of which, the Western Digital 36.7GB 10000RPM Raptor [RTPE: WD360GD] drives have been steady for quite some time now. With a few dollars up and down from time to time, at the moment, this drive is priced at about $105 shipped. The 74GB Western Digital Raptor [RTPE: WD740GD] is now priced at $149 shipped after a $20 mail-in rebate from TigerDirect. Finally, the overall fastest drive on the market, the 150GB Raptor [RTPE: WD1500], is now selling for $276 shipped, making it slightly cheaper per gigabyte than the lower capacity models. Some people might also be interested in spending $75 more to get a small window on the hard drive, but we're certainly not going to recommend it.





PATA

Moving right along, here you'll see the many PATA drives that are available. Looking at the cost per GB, these drives are right up there with the SATA drives these days. As most motherboards currently support SATA drives, we suggest that you go with a SATA drive. However, if you are running an older motherboard or one without the option of the SATA interface, a PATA drive is going to be your only option.

Just as with the SATA drives, you have the option of also going with up to 500GB capacity drives. There are also many that are still being produced with only 2MB of cache. We recommend that you go with at least 8MB of cache, if not 16MB. It can only benefit you, as the price of a drive with 16MB of cache isn't much higher than a drive with only 8 or 2MBs.

We aren't seeing much fluctuation in the prices this time around. Really, the only significant adjustments are within the 400GB category. The most that we are seeing there is about a $30 decrease, which nonetheless is still worthwhile. Throughout all the other PATA sizes, the pricing fluctuations are trivial.

We have broken down the pricing tables here as there are so many drives and this will allow you to easily and quickly find the specific hard drive capacity that you are looking for. If you're interested in drives smaller than 120GB, you can search the price engine manually. Given the price difference between 80 and 120 GB drives, there's really not much point in purchasing the former. If you don't mind mail-in rebates, TigerDirect has a couple of really nice offers: $58 shipped for either the Seagate 160GB 7200.9 or the Maxtor 160GB DiamondMax 10 ($.36/GB).



















SCSI

With the Ultra 320 SCSI drives, several have seen a decent price decrease while a few others have seen a slight increase in cost. If you’re looking for a 68-pin drive, down about $50, you can have the Maxtor Ultra320 147GB 10000RPM 8MB Atlas 10K V [RTPE: 8D147L0], which is at an all-time low of $300 shipped, bringing that to about $2.04 per GB. Going for roughly the same price per GB, the 80-pin Hitachi Ultra320 300GB 10000RPM 8MB Ultrastar 10K300 [RTPE: HUS103030FL3800] is at about $630 shipped.



For users looking to go with the newer SAS drives, do expect to pay a higher premium than for the Ultra 320 drives. The only two manufacturers producing the SAS drives are Maxtor and Seagate. The main difference between the two that we are noticing is that the Maxtor drives come with 16MB of cache while the Seagate drives come with 8MB of cache.

We can see that the Maxtor SAS 73.5GB 15000RPM 16MB Atlas 15K II SAS [RTPE: 8E073S0] is going for about $431 shipped. If you’re looking for a hard drive with a greater capacity, the Maxtor SAS 147GB 10000RPM 16MB Atlas 10K V SAS [RTPE: 8D147S0] is also on sale for about $431. Both of these two drives are priced the same, but you have to make the choice between higher RPMs and more capacity.





DVDR

Lastly, we have the DVDR drives. Since DVDR drives offer the ability to store data off of one's hard drive, they are great for back-ups. Given the extremely cheap prices, we really advise people against purchasing anything other than a DVD recorder these days. There are a number of great drives from which to choose, although we do have a few personal favorites. The NEC 16X ND-3550A [RTPE: ND-3550A] is one of our top picks, going for approximately $36 shipped. The Pioneer 16X DVR-110D [RTPE: DVR-110D] is another one of our favorites, which is currently on sale for about $43. Lastly, while being the most expensive of the bunch, we have the BenQ 16X DW1655 [RTPE: DW1655] priced at about $49 shipped.

If you don't mind paying a hefty premium, there is another niche market DVDR in which a few of you might be interested. The Plextor 16X PX-716AL [RTPE: PX-716AL] is about the only slot loader DVDR on the market. While it normally retails for $150 shipped, Newegg currently has a mail-in rebate that brings the price down to $100. Some of us really like slot load drives, but only a few of us are willing to pay that much money for the feature.



And as the world turns, this finishes off this week's storage price guide. Stay tuned next week as we'll be taking a look at the exciting world of CPUs. Honestly, it's going to be a bit difficult to top the Conroe benchmarks, but those processors are still two quarters away from shipping. Thanks for joining us!