April Hard Drive Price Guide

Introduction

Welcome to the Sharky Extreme Hard Drive Price Guide, which will be a monthly feature and complement our CPU, Memory and Video Card prices guides. This will help provide a snap-shot of the overall market, and follows the same basic pattern as our weekly and monthly price guides. We'll start off with individual price lists for both Parallel and Serial ATA drives, and then by using various sorted lists, move into a more detailed look at overall value and pricing.

The hard drive price lists are not meant to duplicate the vendor selection of an online price engine like PriceWatch, but instead will present an overview of the PATA and SATA hard drive marketplace. We have included a wide range of desktop hard drives from the most popular manufacturers, as well as ensuring a selection of capacities and features.

* Please note that unless otherwise stated (using an Retail designation) the listed hard drives are OEM models.

Parallel ATA Hard Drives

The Parallel ATA hard drive selection rivals that of SATA, and the market is still quite strong. For standard desktop use, these range from basic 40GB models with 2-MB of cache, all the way up to a monster 300GB drive with a whopping 16-MB of cache. These are the two extremes, and the most popular models strike a nice balance, usually sitting in the 120GB to 200GB range, and sporting 8MB of internal cache. We've got all the angles covered in our PATA hard drive price list, and along with the usual drive, price and price change columns, we've also included one for $/GB (cost per GB) and model number.

Since this is the first month for our Hard Drive Price List, there are no real trends to report, but we do see a few nice deals. The 160GB to 200GB range seems to offer the best value, as well as being large enough to support current and future system requirements. In terms of performance options, the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 line is really the place to be for Parallel ATA buyers, and these are looking to unseat the Western Digital Special Edition drives for the PATA enthusiast. This is especially true at the 200GB range, as these models include a full 16MB of data cache and are blazing fast.

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Page 1 April Hard Drive Price Guide Page 2 Serial ATA Hard Drive Price List Page 3 Parallel ATA Hard Drives Sorted by $/GB Page 4 Serial ATA Hard Drives Sorted by $/GB Page 5 Parallel and Serial ATA Hard Drives Sorted by Price

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