Welcome to the Sharky Extreme Hard Drive Price Guide, which is a monthly feature that complements our CPU, Memory and Video Card prices guides. This will help provide a snap-shot of the overall market, and follows the same basic pattern as our weekly and monthly price guides. We'll start off with individual price lists for both Parallel and Serial ATA drives, and then by using various sorted lists, move into a more detailed look at overall value and pricing.
The hard drive price lists are not meant to duplicate the vendor selection of online price engines like PriceWatch or PriceGrabber, but instead will present an overview of the PATA and SATA hard drive marketplace. We have included a wide range of desktop hard drives from the most popular manufacturers, as well as ensuring an extensive selection of capacities and features.
* Please note that unless otherwise stated (using an Retail designation) the listed hard drives are OEM models.
* All listed hard drives are 7200 RPM, other than (as noted) the Western Digital 10K Raptor and 5400/7200 RPM Hybrid models
The Parallel ATA hard drive selection rivals that of SATA, and the market is still quite strong. For standard desktop use, these range from basic 80GB models with 2-MB of cache, all the way up to a monster 500GB and 750GB drives with 8-MB and 16-MB of cache. These are the two extremes, and the most popular models strike a nice balance, usually sitting in the 250GB to 320GB range, and sporting 8MB of internal cache. We've got all the angles covered in our PATA hard drive price list, and along with the usual drive, price and price change columns, we've also included one for $/GB (cost per GB) for easy look-up.
The Parallel ATA drive chart has not been very busy in 2008, and it continues this relative inactivity into October. There were a few price drops, including three drives that fell by double digits. These included the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB (-$24), Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 400GB (-$12) and Seagate Barracuda RK 750GB (-$10) drives. There was only one PATA drive that increased by a similar amount, as the ExcelStor Jupiter 160GB spiked by $11, but this was followed by a $9 spike to the Western Digital Caviar SE 200GB. The PATA chart still managed to finish in the consumer's favor, dropping by an aggregate total of $72.
Serial ATA and the SATA II/SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface is the present and future, and the latest hard drive models are certainly making use of the latest standard. Features such as NCQ and a higher overall data bandwidth really help take some SATA drives to a higher performance plane. For our selected brands and sizes, we've gone the same route as with our PATA list, and included everything from a standard 80GB model, to the top-of-the-line 750GB and 1TB monstrosities, along with the powerful Western Digital Raptor 10K RPM speed demons. As Serial ATA drives are a newer technology, these are decidedly high-end, usually sporting 16MB-32MB of cache and 7200 RPM speeds at the top of the scale. Our SATA hard drive price list features entries for drives, prices and price changes, and a column for $/GB (cost per GB).
The Serial ATA listings are usually a lot more active compared to their PATA counterparts, and don't see the trend changing this month. Eight SATA hard drives fell by double digits, including a massive $53 drop to the Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB drive, while the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 750GB and Hitachi Ultrastar A7K1000 1TB drive received price cuts of $28 and $27, respectively. Thankfully, there were only a few price increases, and just one of note, as the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB jumped by $12. This resulted in another very positive month for SATA buyers, as the chart dropped by an aggregate total of $214.
Standard PATA and SATA hard drives still make up the vast majority of desktop PC, or even notebook, configurations, but demand for Solid State Drive (SSD) technology is growing by leaps and bounds. SSD drives replace conventional hard drive platters, motors and read heads with flash memory, lowering noise, heat and power requirements, while offering significant performance gains. These SSD drives also represent a popular upgrade for existing notebooks, and even high-end desktop users are migrating to this technology as their primary boot/OS drive. Due to this increased demand and a significant rise in SSD visibility with online retailers, this is an emerging market that deserves coverage. In this section, we are covering 2.5" SATA SSDs, although 3.5" models will be forthcoming.
As this is the first month for Solid State Drive pricing, there is no data for comparison, in terms of either price changes or shifts in drive value. On the other hand, it's easy to see a wide divergence of price levels for these Solid State Drives, ranging from just over $100 for a Transcend 32GB all the way up to $700-$800+ for ultra high-end 64GB models from OCZ and SuperTalent. This is a different market compared to tradition hard drives, where brand, drive cache and rotational speed could help derive some level of real-world performance, and when it comes to SSDs, you often get what (performance) you pay for.
The following chart takes a slightly different angle on Parallel ATA hard drive prices, and attempts to discern overall value using a price per GB figure, and then sorting by it. This chart pushes the lowest $/GB rating to the top, and uses a tried-and-true method of illustrating where the best overall values may exist, Of course, no method is foolproof, and other factors like performance or features certainly come into play, but it does give us a different view on which hard drive brands, speeds and capacities offer the best bang for the buck.
The Parallel ATA value chart continued its existing trends, and we continue to see a wide range of drive capacities in the top 10 list, from 320GB to 750GB. The 500GB drives hold down the two top spots, with the Western Digital Caviar SE 500GB checking in at 15-cents/GB, while its big brother, the Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB, is not far back at 16-cents/GB. The Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 400GB is mathematically in third spot, and we continue to see 400GB and 500GB models holding down the majority of the best value rankings - seven out of the top ten this month.
