Price Guides August 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage

Hard Drives: Serial ATA

While PATA drives still dominate store shelves and desktops currently in use, SATA is trying to break through and gain wider use and acceptance among end users and their PCs. This process has been going rather slowly, since most users would require a new motherboard, or at least an add-in SATA controller card, in order to use these newer drives. To top it off, SATA offers no performance gains over PATA drives yet (Western Digital Raptors excepted.) For now, the only real advantage of SATA would seem to be the nice small cables, which can lead to better case airflow and asthetics.

To combat this, many manufacturers have worked to bring SATA prices in line with their PATA counterparts and have been, for the most part, successful.

Right now, Maxtor takes another lead with their 160GB SATA drive, which retails for just a little over $10 more than its PATA sibling. If space and airflow are an issue in your PC and you have the necessary connections, SATA is a good way to bring your computer into the new without spending a lot of money. This drive is identical to the PATA version and differs only in its connection type.

Capacity can still be had with SATA, courtesy of Western Digital's SATA 250GB 7200RPM drive. This HDD is less than $0.01 more per GB than the Maxtor above, yet wields enough capacity for even the most demanding desktop users.

As usual, if performance is the target, Western Digital's Raptor drives are right on top of the mountain, competing very well with even some top-end SCSI drives with a much lower cost.