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January 2007 Hard Drive Price Guide - Page 2By SharkyExtreme.com Staff January 26, 2007Serial 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. Surprisingly, the Serial ATA hard drive chart was far more sedate than the Parallel ATA listings, something that doesn't happen that often. The overall chart drop was a measly $25 for the month, and none of the individual price cuts exceeded $16. There were four price cuts that registered in double-digits, including the Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB (-$16), Hitachi Deskstar 400GB (-$13), Samsung SpinPoint T133 300GB (-$11), and Western Digital Caviar SE 300GB (-$11) drives. There were three similar price increases to report, the largest of which was a hefty $27 spike to the cost of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB hard drive. This level of stability is not that unusual, especially considering the dearth of new products - Seagate produces the only 750GB models and the other manufacturers have stalled at 500GB.
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