Price Guides, July 2005: Storage
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on July 10, 2005 7:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
PATA
Even though SATA has some really nice deals going on, and their cost per GB is steadily decreasing, PATA just won't die. The new Seagate 7200.8 drives came out of left field over the last few weeks and dropped the cost per GB almost $0.10 since our last guide to $0.39! Just take a look at the historical trend for the Seagate 250GB 7200.8 [RTPE: ST3250823A].
Seagate ATA100 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Barracuda 7200.8
PATA keeps clinging to life, but mostly because none of the hard drive manufacturers are willing to let it go. Obviously if Samsung or Maxtor pull out of the PATA market, Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi will just continue to manufacturer drives and snap up the abandoned market share. In several years all of these manufacturers will probably regret having the excess inventory on their hands, but as long as motherboard manufacturers continue to pump out boards with legacy components no one need worry.
Western Digital has another $30 mail in rebate for their 300GB Caviar SE [RTPE: WD3000JB], so if you like to live life on the edge a bit you may wish to check that deal out.
Even though the PATA market isn't dying, it is running out of 5400RPM drives; the cost ratio on MaXLine II drives continues to rise in favor of the MaXLine Plus II (7200RPM MaXLine II) and MaXLine III drives. As seek speed is penalized proportionally to the size of the drive and the RPM, we couldn't be happier that the better performing 7200RPM drives are taking the lead.
Although 400GB drives have been on the move, 200GB to 320GB drives have dropped faster, thus penalizing the cost per GB for anyone who really doesn't need the density of the large drives. We have listed the 400GB drives below, but don't jump on these unless you absolutely need to have 2TB in your PC.
Unfortunately there isn't much else to report about PATA drives. Just keep watching the cost per GB plummet.
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Phiro - Monday, July 11, 2005 - link
It's all about the Pentiums!coomar - Monday, July 11, 2005 - link
its all about the cost of the media, blue-ray will take a while to drop, at least 2 years probablyKristopherKubicki - Sunday, July 10, 2005 - link
yacoub: That should have read 200GB mark instead of $200 mark. Ooops!xsilver: The original roadmaps I saw put bluyray-r and hddvdr around Q1'06. Im guessing that they will probably cost a few hundred bucks each though, so even if the drives (and more importantly media) show up, development on reducing the cost of existing optical storage drives will continue. I would expect several more iterations of the ND-3xxx/4xxx line even when next gen burners become available.
Kristopher
xsilver - Sunday, July 10, 2005 - link
"NEC's next generation dual format burner is also slated to support LightScribe and should debut at the same time as the ND-4550A. "Does anybody know whether this will be one of the last dvd drives out before the whole blu ray thing takes over?
yacoub - Sunday, July 10, 2005 - link
"SATA drives start to break into those magic low cost per GB ratios around the $200 mark."Zuh?? This line comes after a large chart showing a list of SATA drives priced around $80. 0__o
ProviaFan - Sunday, July 10, 2005 - link
SAS looks interesting, I'll have to do some more reading on that. :)Hacp - Sunday, July 10, 2005 - link
2nd post!ryanv12 - Sunday, July 10, 2005 - link
looks like the 400GB PATA storage section got a couple of 40 giggers stuck in there :)