Price Guides, March 2005: Storage
by Kristopher Kubicki on March 7, 2005 7:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Parallel ATA Hard Drives
In each guide edition, we take special notice at the difference in price between PATA and SATA as a whole. Aside from what motherboard manufacturers would have us think, Parallel ATA drives aren’t going anywhere in the near future, and we only need to look at the number of MaXLine III and 7200.8 drives as proof of that. Obviously, there are no NCQ benefits on PATA, but for drives that cost anywhere between 5 and 10 cents less per GB than their SATA counterparts, the lack of advanced SATA features might be worth the trade off.There are a lot of choices to sift through when determining the best hard drive choice. Like with many things in computers, you’re penalized for considering older (but not obsolete) hardware, such as the 80GB and smaller drives. The 40GB and 60GB drives actually have worse price per gigabyte ratios, and one would have to be mad to buy an $80 60GB hard drive over a $60 80GB one.
Last generation’s DiamondMaxs, Caviars and Deskstars top our cost per Gigabyte charts for March, but surprisingly, the 160GB and 200GB marks are the sweet spots for PATA compared to the 250GB sweet spot for SATA drives. All PATA drives under 250GB are cheaper than their SATA counterparts, but the differences are now measured in one or two dollars compared to the 20% difference from a year ago.
We still don’t recommend going all out on 300GB or 400GB drives just yet, although the price has come down considerably (more so on the SATA variants).
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Live - Wednesday, March 9, 2005 - link
I second Semo. Now that firewire 800 is coming strong external looks even more tempting.semo - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Kristopher, could you include external storage solutions in your brilliant price guides. there have been some really interesting options lately like the wd passport and lacie 300693... both are host powered mobile hdds but i don't know which one is better.MadAd - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
#8 No not really. The important thing is whether all drives are measured the same way. Its just a comparison.Auzner - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Wouldn't it make more sense to calculate $/GB by [$/(.93*GB)]? Because a 250gb isn't really a 250gb because of the 1000^3/1024^3 stuff.KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
MrEMan: The drives are listed as ATA100 - because quite frankly ATA133 is ATA100. ATA133 isn't *really* a spec. But I digress :-Pdev0lution: The graph generator is actually writing Feb01 - as in February first. I'll see if I can't tweak it in the future.
Kristopher
dev0lution - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Price graph's listing 2001 as the year in the dates?MrEMan - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
I notice that quite a few of the Maxtor PATA drives are listed as ATA 100, when in fact Maxtor is the only major manufacturer producing ATA 133 drives, which makes since they created the spec.MadAd - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
I noticed the price of the 250Gb 7200.8s drop in the UK too, I just picked up 4 for £346 delivered - STR benches upto 90MB/s on a TX4000 in raid 10- its like having a raptor with half a TB of space :)segagenesis - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
Riplock = most of the modern drives will only let you read a movie at 2x on purpose to discourage ripping. There are firmware mods if you dont care about warranty to remove this (and enable RPC-1 if you have movies from other regions, like I do). On the ND-2500 I can get 12x rip at the end of the disc (or layer break) rather than maybe 3.6x.dragonballgtz - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link
OK, what is riplock? :confused;