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 were more active than the Parallel ATA chart, and the total chart decrease of $69 was an improvement compared to the aggregate $29 chart drop from October. There were a ton of individual price cuts, but only three reached double digits - the Western Digital SE 250GB (-$28), Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB (-$20), and Samsung T133 400GB (-$10) drives. This offered some good news for SATA hard drive buyers, and the fact that the largest price increase was only $10 (hitting both the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB and Western Digital RAID Edition 250GB drives) gave us the larger-than expected chart decrease. The only other news is the continued emergence of the Seagate 7200.10 family, and the Barracuda 7200.10 400GB is the latest model to find its way into our chart.
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