Price Guides September 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage

Hard Drives: SATA

Serial ATA continues to push its way into the market and into desktops slowly, but surely. Most motherboards today come with onboard SATA controllers in addition to the standard PATA to make the transition easier. Many also support RAID on the SATA controller, making it just as viable as PATA, if not more future-minded.

Prices do appear to be moving slightly upwards for SATA within the last few weeks, which is an odd change considering the simple reality that the only difference between SATA and PATA is the interface itself. All else inside the drive is identical to PATA.

Regardless, it's still worth considering SATA if you're looking to upgrade or build a new system. Only if you don't currently have an SATA capable motherboard would it really be necessary to hold off.

Hitachi has been doing well since their acquisition of IBM's HDD business and they have the prices to prove it. For under $100, you can snag a Hitachi SATA 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB drive, which is comparable to the cost of PATA without much bloat.

On the performance side, one cannot forget about Western Digital's Raptor drives. Extremely fast, these drives push data in and out quicker than any other ATA-based drive and complement a high-end system well. While still a bit pricey per gigabyte, they are still cheaper than most SCSI alternatives or the same performance level, and for that reason, they are worth considering when performance is more of a requirement than capacity.