Serial ATA may be the interface of today, but SATA II/SATA 3.0 Gb/sec. (S2 in our charts) is the future, and the latest drive models are certainly making use of the new standard. Features such as NCQ and a higher overall data 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. As Serial ATA drives are a newer technology, these are decidedly high-end, even at the entry-level, sporting 8MB of cache and 7200 RPM speeds as the base minimum. Our SATA hard drive price list features entries for drives, prices and price changes, and columns for $/GB (cost per GB) and model number.
The PATA chart demonstrated some noticeable price movement, but the Serial ATA hard drive selection was even more active, posting a very impressive aggregate chart drop of $275. The SATA chart may have equaled the PATA list with nine double-digit cuts, but there were some very deep price drops to go along with this, such as the Western Digital SE16 500GB (-$60), Maxtor DiamondMax 11 400GB (-$32), Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 400GB (-$32), and Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB (-$30) hard drives. As with the Parallel ATA chart, there is very little upward price movement, and there is only a single price increase hitting double digits, and nothing above $6 after that.
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