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February 2007 Hard Drive Price Guide - Page 2By SharkyExtreme.com Staff March 1, 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. The overall Serial ATA hard drive chart didn't fare much better than the Parallel ATA listings, posting an aggregate drop of only $79, but there was more activity in terms of individual price increases and decreases. The SATA drive chart had eight models that fell by double-digits, including the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB (-$35), Western Digital Caviar SE16 400GB (-$26), Samsung SpinPoint 200GB (-$24), and Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB (-$23) hard drives. But this was offset by some ugly price spikes to higher-capacity Maxtor drive, especially an $83 jump that hit the Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB. This seems to be a case of lower supplies not being able to satisfy demand, as new owner Seagate is transitioning Maxtor as their entry-level brand.
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