SCSI
Apparently we jumped the gun a little bit last week when we claimed SAS drives were ready for the retail channel. SAS, or Serial Attached SCSI, is essentially the SCSI Trade Organization's counter to 3GBps SATA. Just as there is debate as to whether or not 3GBps SATA will provide any benefit over traditional 1.5GBps SATA, there is a bit of an internal struggle in the SCSI Trade Organization as for the direction of SAS too. If anything, SAS is really an alternative to fiber channel rather than a successor of SCSI or SATA. The drives are prohibitively expensive and hardly offer any real features over SCSI U320, so why become an early adopter? Anyways, the tallies are official; Maxtor made it to channel first with SAS, and we don't recommend it. If you really need SAS, you knew five years ago already.
Last month's Price Guide detailed the very few deals in the SCSI market. As we mentioned earlier, as soon as Maxtor began to push the price per GB below that of Western Digital's Raptors, WD released a semi-permanent Mail In Rebate. Obviously there are advantages in favor of SATA or SCSI, but when 10,000RPM SATA and SCSI drives cost the same, the consumer benefits. We featured Seagate's 10K.7 73GB [RTPE: ST373207LC] drive last week, but since then Maxtor's Atlas 10K V [RTPE: 8D073J0] became the most aggressively priced drive on the block; and only at a $20 out-the-door discount over Western Digital's 74GB Raptor. Check out Maxtor's recent price cuts below:
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zemane - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
Kristopher: About the RTPE graph, could the y axis be on multiples of 5, e.g., 5, 10, 15; or 20, 30, 40; or 150, 250, 350, etc.I feel this is more intuitive and helps getting a quick idea of how prices or volume are changing.
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
I'll try my best.Kristopher
huges84 - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
I just bought a Seagate 7200.8 250GB SATA drive for my computer becuase it was so quiet in the computer that I built for my brother. My old 120GB Maxtor 6Y120L0 was the loudest part of my computer.With the Seagates you can't even hear them in either computer unless you put your ear right next to that part of the case. Now I actually have to look at the HDD activity light to know when my harddrive is busy. And the speed is amazing.
I would definitely recommend that anyone who thinks they could use a new drive not hesitate and jump on it. The improvement is well worth it, especially since the harddrive can be the biggest bottleneck in any modern system.
PrinceGaz - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
Pretty much any decent new hard-drive these days has fluid dynamic bearings, so all of them from any manufacturer are a lot quieter than drives of a few years ago.The prices of both PATA and SATA drives up to 250GB or so, is so cheap now there's no reason to opt for anything less. Even if you're only likely to use 100GB or less, having a larger drive that costs only slightly more will give higher performance as all the data will be on the outside of the disk giving higher transfer rates and reduced seek-times.
Hard drives are an absolute bargain these days imo.
SpaceRanger - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
Would like to see them start adding Notebook HD's in there as well.huges84 - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
agreedCZroe - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
Retail has always been the best way to purchase hard drives so I really don't see the point of this guide. Fry's had the Raptor 36GB drive for $69 after rebate this past week. Best Buy had the WD1200JB 120GB drives for $19.99 after rebate and I've been buying them for that cheap for years now (They show up every few weeks). I've gotten four 7k400 400GB drives from Fry's for $179.99ea with NO tax. Even Office Depot and Office Max have MUCH better prices. These price guides are only useful if you can't do anything else but purchase immediately and you have no local electronics stores.bdoney - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
Nice price guide, and it's useful but it would be nice to have rebate information on there. I just picked up two WD 160GB drives at a local electronic store chain. The price was $120 each with $80 of rebates for each drive. With pricing like that, I can't see buying any other hard drive unless you REALLY want the cutting edge.huges84 - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
The price guides have never been about rebates, because you are still paying $120 for the drive. You cannot get that drive if you only have $40. Yes, when all is said and done 8 weeks (or more) later, you may or may not get $80 back. But even then you will have lost that purchasing power for a while and lost all possinbility of interest on that money.Besides, the price guides are all about finding good components at the best (relativley) dependable prices. You should be able to read a price guide from two weeks ago on motherboards and the recommendations should still be mostly the same as they would be right this second. Afterall, the priceguides for every category aren't redone every week.
But of course rebates still offer low prices, and some people have no problem with them. (I don't like them but it doesn't mean I won't jump on a really great deal). For those people, there are the forums where people can post hot deals. Also, I would suggest you checkout the best place for hot deals: BensBargains.net That place is all about the absolute best prices.
PrinceGaz - Monday, August 29, 2005 - link
Splitting the HD price tables into seperate sections depending on capacity is good, but there's a slight glitch. In the 400GB tables, 40GB drives are showing up as well. I guess a little more tweaking is needed of the algorithm used to select them.I picked up a Maxtor MaxLine III 250GB SATA drive last week which I've been very impressed with so far. You have the drive listed in the SATA section rather than SATA II, but according to Maxtor the drive has
SATA II features, including:
- Native command queuing
- Hot plug
- Staggered spin-up
- Asynchronous signal recovery
so the MaxLine III drives probably belong in the SATA II section.