Price Guides October 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage

Hard Drives: SATA

Nearly every time a newer motherboard is sold, another user becomes a candidate for the use of Serial ATA hard drives. With that kind of widespread adoption from motherboard manufacturers, and with SATA add-in controller cards available for next to nothing, SATA is poised to accept its new position as the standard in consumer data storage. There is currently no real-world benefit to using SATA, since the disks are usually the same as their PATA brothers except for the physical interface. This means that the seek times are rarely different and that you are protecting your storage investment for a longer period of time by making the switch. With prices nearly identical to PATA drives of the same capacity and overall performance, there's no reason to avoid SATA as it will eventually become the de-facto standard.

So to get the most out of your storage system, drives such as the Samsung U150 160GB 7200RPM 8MB can be had for under $100 and still give you the most storage capacity for your money.

If performance is your goal, then the Western Digital Raptor series of hard drives is the best option available for xATA-based devices. Specifically, the 74GB variant is known to compete very well with some of the fastest SCSI drives out there. Also worth mentioning is the Maxtor U150 300GB 7200RPM 16MB, which, while not the most cost effective drive on the market, is able to boost its performance through caching.