Serial ATA may be the interface of today, but SATA II/SATA 3.0 Gb/sec. is the future, and the latest hard 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 and 750GB monstrosities, along with the powerful 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 Serial ATA hard drive listings are usually more active than the Parallel ATA chart, and we do see that trend taking effect again in October. Unfortunately, the term "active" does not always translate into good news, and this month is a testament to that. We counted seven price drops that reached double digits, but there were also five price increases at the same level. In terms of good news, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 250GB and Samsung T133 400GB drives both dropped by $17, but these were perfectly matched by $18 and $16 price increases to the Western Digital SE 250GB and Raptor 36.7GB drives. This helped mute the individual price activity, and produce an overall chart effect that resulted in a nominal $29 aggregate drop for October.
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