Price Guides November 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage

Hard Drives: SATA

While there aren't any truly compelling reasons yet to buy a SATA drive over a PATA one, some may find the small differences to be convenient or useful. The smaller cables used can help with internal cable routing quite a bit if you are working with a cramped case or even a small form-factor system where getting air flow to critical components can be a major challenge. Additionally, many older power supplies do not come with connectors for SATA power, which would create the need for an adapter, a new power supply, or one of the fairly numerous SATA drives that still sport the classic Molex connection with which everyone is familiar. Otherwise, there really isn't too much to push SATA to the average consumer except for a few situations.

With the above in mind, one of the biggest reasons why many power users and enthusiasts may want to switch to SATA is because of the Western Digital Raptors. These drives rival many of the best SCSI devices in overall performance and, in some cases, actually outperform them. This is fairly impressive considering the price tag that is commonly associated with SCSI drives. Unfortunately, with this heightened level of performance comes a heightened price tag. Raptors cannot be had yet for even as low as $1 per gigabyte and the price hasn't really trailed off much since their launch. If performance is of utmost importance, a 74GB Raptor is definitely a great choice, albeit somewhat costly.


Outside of Raptors, Maxtor also has what appears to be their performance line-up of SATA drives, which sport a 16MB cache. While this does help, and the price is not overly steep for this feature, we have heard of some people having issues with the drives. Most reports appear to be heat related, but nothing that appears to cause any actual problem. (If you have these drives, let us know about your experiences - good, bad, or mixed.)

Right now, the best value in SATA lies in your basic, run-of-the-mill 8MB, 7200RPM models. One drive worth looking at is the Samsung U150 160GB 7200RPM 8MB. Feedback from current owners of this drive seems to be a sea of positives as customers point out the very low noise and heat output as positives, and the 3-year warranty is definitely welcome when most drives are lucky to come with a single year (of warranty).