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April 2008 Hard Drive Price Guide - Page 2By SharkyExtreme.com Staff April 30, 2008Serial ATA and the SATA II/SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface is the present and future, and the latest hard drive models are certainly making use of the latest 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 750GB and 1TB monstrosities, along with the powerful Western Digital Raptor 10K RPM speed demons. As Serial ATA drives are a newer technology, these are decidedly high-end, usually sporting 16MB-32MB of cache and 7200 RPM speeds at the top of the scale. Our SATA hard drive price list features entries for drives, prices and price changes, and a column for $/GB (cost per GB). Once again, the price drops we found in the PATA chart were quickly overshadowed by the Serial ATA hard drives. Fifteen SATA models showed double-digit price cuts, including five at $20 or more - including the Western Digital Caviar GP 1TB (-$35), Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB (-$30), Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB (-$26), and Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB (-$24) drives. In terms of price increases, only a single SATA model increased by a similar amount, and that was only a $10 spike to the Samsung SpinPoint 250GB hard drive. The overall pricing trends were very positive, and an aggregate chart drop of $281 is certainly good news for buyers.
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