August 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 online price engines like PriceWatch or PriceGrabber, 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.

* All listed hard drives are 7200 RPM, other than the 10K WD Raptor 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 80GB models with 2-MB of cache, all the way up to a monster 300GB and 400GB drives with 8-MB and 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.

There wasn't a lot of overall change in the PATA hard drive list, but we do see a few larger cuts making up for it. These include the Western Digital RAID Edition 320GB model, which fell by $40, and some smaller drops hitting the Western Digital SE 320GB (-$17) and Western Digital RAID Edition 120GB (-$11) drives. In terms of overall PATA movement, the entire list posted a total decrease of just over $150, which translates into a good week for hard drive buyers. The largest cuts certainly took a chunk out of the total PATA price drop, but there were also very few price increases, with none reaching higher than $3.

---

Page 1 August 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 Change Page 6 Parallel and Serial ATA Hard Drives Sorted by Price

0 Comment[s] (click to add your comment)

Comment and Contribute

Your name/nickname

Your email

Your website

(Maximum characters: 1200). You have 1200 characters left.