Price Guides, March 2005: Storage
by Kristopher Kubicki on March 7, 2005 7:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Serial ATA Hard Drives
The standard for choosing the best hard drive since the beginning has been to calculate the cost per gigabyte of the drive; what gives the most storage for the buck. Cache sizes and spin speed aside, most hard drives are created equally enough that 1GB of Brand A still equates to 1GB of Brand B. Just to get started, we compiled a short list of most of the serial ATA drives on the market today and their relative cost per GB.Keep in mind, our price engine constantly updates the prices on products, but the table above reflects the cost per GB of products that we listed on March 5 th, 2005. The SATA market is particularly interesting because most of the products are based on Parallel ATA devices that debuted two years ago or relatively new unbridged solutions like in the example of the 7200.8 Seagate drives. Features like NCQ and RAID aside, the real advantage of going with SATA is the new technology; there are more current generation drives on the SATA interface than on PATA. Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10 and MaXLine II products really dominate the price per gigabyte this month, but MaXLine III (NCQ) SATA drives are still shy on availability. 250GB drives clearly mark the sweet spot for price per storage on SATA drives.
Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10 drives incorporate “fluid bearing motors”, which really isn’t that unique for a hard drive (as any physicist will tell you, air is technically a fluid), but these are relatively quiet drives. On the other hand, Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.8 series drives are certainly nothing to scoff at either, particularly considering the 5-year warranty. Since the 7200.8s are relatively new, their cost per GB is a little high still, which makes it tough to recommend them just yet. But for those of us with the “Deathstar” memories fresh in our heads, seeing a manufacturer commit to five years of service on a product is a welcomed change for the better, and paying a little extra for that kind of commitment doesn’t seem like a bad idea in the long run. Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.8 or Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10 still retain our top recommendation for 250GB SATA drives.
The 300GB and 400GB hard drives have made considerable progress in lowering the cost per gigabyte over the last few months, and probably the best example of that is Hitachi’s older 400GB Deskstar 7K250 [RTPE: HDS724040KLSA80]. Over the last six months, the cost of this particular drive has dropped $150, which just illustrates that there is some fire left in competitive hard drive pricing, and you can see our tracking history below.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
11 Comments
View All Comments
Live - Wednesday, March 9, 2005 - link
I second Semo. Now that firewire 800 is coming strong external looks even more tempting.semo - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Kristopher, could you include external storage solutions in your brilliant price guides. there have been some really interesting options lately like the wd passport and lacie 300693... both are host powered mobile hdds but i don't know which one is better.MadAd - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
#8 No not really. The important thing is whether all drives are measured the same way. Its just a comparison.Auzner - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Wouldn't it make more sense to calculate $/GB by [$/(.93*GB)]? Because a 250gb isn't really a 250gb because of the 1000^3/1024^3 stuff.KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
MrEMan: The drives are listed as ATA100 - because quite frankly ATA133 is ATA100. ATA133 isn't *really* a spec. But I digress :-Pdev0lution: The graph generator is actually writing Feb01 - as in February first. I'll see if I can't tweak it in the future.
Kristopher
dev0lution - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Price graph's listing 2001 as the year in the dates?MrEMan - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
I notice that quite a few of the Maxtor PATA drives are listed as ATA 100, when in fact Maxtor is the only major manufacturer producing ATA 133 drives, which makes since they created the spec.MadAd - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
I noticed the price of the 250Gb 7200.8s drop in the UK too, I just picked up 4 for £346 delivered - STR benches upto 90MB/s on a TX4000 in raid 10- its like having a raptor with half a TB of space :)segagenesis - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Riplock = most of the modern drives will only let you read a movie at 2x on purpose to discourage ripping. There are firmware mods if you dont care about warranty to remove this (and enable RPC-1 if you have movies from other regions, like I do). On the ND-2500 I can get 12x rip at the end of the disc (or layer break) rather than maybe 3.6x.dragonballgtz - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
OK, what is riplock? :confused;