Buyer's Guide - Entry Level, January 2005

Hard Drives

All of the motherboards that we have selected in this Guide include Serial ATA ports, and so we will confine our hard drive recommendations to that area. It's not that SATA is any faster than PATA in terms of real world performance; it's just that the cables are so much easier to work with and we're rather tired of the cumbersome, old IDE interface. The total difference in price is basically meaningless, usually coming in at less than $5. Of course, picking up the same drive with either interface is possible, so if you want an IDE model due to your motherboard/system choice, don't let the lack of SATA hold you back. In fact, overclockers can generally achieve better results with IDE than SATA.

The only issue with SATA drives is that depending on how the SATA support is included on the motherboard, a floppy disk with a driver may be required to install Windows XP. For the Intel systems and the socket 754 option, that shouldn't be required, but the socket A platform may require the use of a floppy disk. Actually, since the NVIDIA MCP-S chip provides the SATA support, you're probably okay there as well - we haven't actually verified this, so we cannot say for sure - however, it's definitely something to pay attention to if you're looking at other motherboard options. Regardless of what platform you choose, though, it is our view that for the added $8-$10 that a floppy drive costs, it is still a useful inclusion. Some BIOS updates still require it, and we already mention the potential XP installation problem. You may only use it a few times a year (if that), but for the one or two times where you actually need it, we hate to scramble around trying to find a workaround.

 

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Hard Drive Recommendation: Seagate 80 GB 7200 RPM 8MB SATA
Price: $69 shipped

We've talked about this in most of the past guides, but to recap, the Seagate drives are a great choice. They come with the longest standard warranty (5 years), they use near-silent fluid dynamic bearings, they offer more than sufficient storage, and their price and performance are more than acceptable. You could save up to $5 by going with a Western Digital PATA drive, but those drives have a tendency to develop a high-pitched whine that we would just as soon not deal with. Maxtor, Hitachi, and Samsung also make similar drives, but the Seagate usually wins out in at least one area, at least with the 80GB SATA drives - their IDE models have started to go up in price, it seems.

 

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Hard Drive Alternative: Samsung 160 GB 7200 RPM 8MB SATA (or IDE)
Price: $92 shipped

Seagate still makes a good hard drive if you want something larger than 80 GB, but as the size increases, their price doesn't stay as low as competitors' offerings. Samsung is just as quiet as Seagate, and at about $20 cheaper than the Seagate SATA drive, we prefer their 160 GB offering. (The IDE version is available for the same price if you want to go that route.) When you get right down to it, the 160 GB Samsung makes a very good alternative to the 80 GB drives. It costs about 33% more, but doubles the storage capacity. Granted, many people won't ever use up even an 80 (or 40) GB hard drive, and that's why the 80 GB drive gets our recommendation. However, if you plan to store a lot of music, movies, images, games, etc. on your computer, it's definitely a worthwhile investment.

Those of you who have been around a while may remember the "good old days" where people used to talk about the price (in dollars) per MB of hard drive capacity. $200 for a 40 MB hard drive was once a bargain! Now, we have the 80 GB drives coming in at 86 cents per GB, and the 160 GB drives are only 57 cents per GB. How many more years until we begin to look at the price per TB of storage for a single hard drive? Technology is a wonderful thing.