Serial ATA may be the interface of today, but SATA II is the future, and the latest drive models are certainly making use of the new standard. Features such as NCQ and a higher overall 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 400GB monstrosities and 10K RPM speed demons. The number of PATA drives may outnumber the SATA selection, but Serial ATA drives are decidedly high-end, even at the entry-level and will sport 8MB of cache and 7200 RPM speeds. Our SATA hard drive price list features entries for drives, prices and price changes, and also columns for $/GB (cost per GB) and model number.
As with the PATA commentary, with this being the first edition of our Hard Drive Price List, the usual pricing trends are simply not available to us. Instead, let's look over the selection of SATA drives and see how these differ from our PATA models. To start off, many of the features and speeds are simply not available outside of the SATA arena, and if NCQ-enabled drives or 10K RPM demons are your cup of tea, then this is the list for you. Seagate offers a wide range of very attractive SATA products, and their NCQ models are quite the relative value. The same can be said for the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 line, which is also SATA II/NCQ compatible, while the higher-end capacities sport a 16MB data cache.
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