Price Guides, March 2005: Storage

Welcome back to another edition of the Price Guides. It’s been very long since we looked at any storage products on strictly a price basis, but now that next generation drives have picked up some availability, it’s about that time again. As another reminder, the RealTime Price Guides is leaving the beta testing phase, and moving into production real soon! Please send us your comments and suggestions on how we can improve our engine. Of course, you can always view the existing release of the engine here. Furthermore, you can view the still beta QuickSearch RSS feed forum thread here.

You might recall that we took our first look at the MaXLine III series back in June of last year and availability has been anything but consistent. There have been more NCQ drives on the market in the past couple of months, and of course, lots and lots of very big drives too. In mid-January, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 NCQ drives really started to hit the retail vendors in full force and since then, there have been some really excellent deals on performance Seagate drives.

All of those 16X DVD burners that were rushed out to market without any 16X write support have now been replaced by more capable 9 th generation drives. Pioneer and NEC both unleashed new revisions on their last burners, and the battle for 16X “round two” is all but over. We still have full details concerning this and previous generations of DVD burners in this week’s guide, but the choices are getting more and more obvious.