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 500GB monstrosities and WD Raptor 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.
The Serial ATA hard drive listings showed a bit more activity this month, and the aggregate price drop of $197 more than doubled that of the PATA chart. There were also larger individual price cuts, including a very attractive $44 plunge on the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB 16-MB cache behemoth. This automatically turns it into a superb performance value, but the Seagate 400GB (-$28) and 250GB (-$15) also showed nice drops as well. The best news of all comes on the price increase side, and there was virtually no upward movement with SATA hard drives.
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