Parallel ATA Hard Drives
The differences between SATA II and SATA may be minimal, but SATA still beats PATA hands down with the occasional exception of price. Things have changed a lot over the last couple of months and there are still deals here and there, but SATA is becoming more predominant everyday. As you'll notice below, except for the first few drives, the cost per GB (particularly on larger sized drives) is the same or better on SATA.It's starting to get hard for us to list prices on certain drives (such as the sub 80GB units) since the cost ratio is so poor. In fact, buying any sub 80GB PATA drive seems quite silly since every unit costs the same anyway, but the 80GB drives obviously pack more space. We may consider phasing these drives out in the next iterations of the price guides.
The old adage used to be that you bought a PATA drive if you just wanted space, and didn't care about the speed. Things have changed a bit over the last year, although occasionally, PATA is cheaper for purely raw data storage. 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). Seagate's 7200.8 [RTPE: Seagate 7200.8] series and Hitachi's 7K400 [RTPE: Hitachi 7K400] series stand together as the only real 400GB solutions right now, and the price per GB is not great either. Prices have been on the decline - it just makes more sense to spend the extra few dollars on the NCQ-ready SATA versions of both of these drives. Below, you can see the price details on the Hitachi 400GB Deskstar [RTPE: HDS7240KLAT80], which dropped almost $50 in price since our last guide:
Hitachi ATA100 400GB 7200RPM 8MB Deskstar 7K400
Maxtor ATA100 250GB 7200RPM 8MB MaXLine Plus II
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zemane - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
#13:Thanks for the info Kristopher!
knightspawn1138 - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
I'd like to see the Storage price guide include USB Flash drives (and USB thumb-drive mini-hard drives). Now that these drives are closing in on DVD's for storage size, they should be treated similar to the rest of the storage media. I for one would like to see a price guide for USB flash drives, since I've come to depend on a couple for use as boot disks on my PC.Doormat - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
Yea! The prices on large (>= 300GB) SATA drives are finally starting to go down. Cant wait for Seagate 300GB drives to be $150/ea - two for $300! I remember when I bought two 60GXPs for that much. Now if I could only find a good inexpensive RAID card... you guys should do a RAID-5/6 card review (raidcore, 3ware, adaptec, areca, etc). I see that other sites have them, but I really dont trust those sites...KristopherKubicki - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
zemane: I like the 3520A better, but that is mostly due to the price. The write quality on the PX716A is a little better.On the other hand, if you need features like riplock, you don't even have the opportunity to use a modified BIOS on the plextor (unlike the NEC).
Kristopher
zemane - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
How does the NEC 3520A compares to the PLEXTOR PX-716A?KristopherKubicki - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
semo: That should read DW1625. Sorry!matthewfoley: I will do my best to implement that. Right now we just list core name as part of the processor name.
Kristopher
semo - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
i think something is wrong here (or it could just be me):"BenQ actually already began to phase out their 16X DW160 [RTPE: BenQ DW1620] in favor of the dual layer, dual format 16X DW160 [RTPE: BenQ DW1625], although the only real performance boost is 4X dual layer burning opposed to 2.4X ..."
what does dw160 mean and how can it be phased out in favour of itself (or am i not getting this right?)
anyway, it should be added that the dw1625 supports lightscribe technology. it may not be considered exciting or useful by many ppl but it is still worth a mention imo.
flatblastard - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
knowflatblastard - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
Can't wait for that one, KK. I'm ready to buy one of them crazy numbered ased AMD processors anyday now....just waiting for ATI or Sapphire to get off their lazy bums and gimme the mobo/chipset that I want! I'm thinking 3500+/3800+ V or 3700+/4000+ SD. So hopefully soon I'll no more than that, hopefully ;)matthewfoley - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
Could we get some sorting capability on the RTPE? For example, on processors, I'd like to see a separate column for name, core, price, and be able to order by that column.