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Sharky Extreme : Monthly Value Gaming System Buyer's Guide |
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Monthly Value Gaming System Buyer's Guide |
January Hard Drive + SSD Price Guide - Page 2By SharkyExtreme.com Staff January 30, 2009Serial 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). It wasn't much better in the Serial ATA listings, as this chart displayed a near-standoff between the price increases and decreases. There were plenty of both, including five double-digit price drops, with $18 off the Western Digital Raptor X 150GB being the largest. A quartet of similar price increases canceled these out, with the Western Digital RAID Ed2 320GB (+$11) and Western Digital RAID Ed2 GP 1TB (+$20) drives showing off the most substantial price jumps. This created an almost equal meeting of chart forces, with the price decreases squeezing out a slim -$2 victory.
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