September 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 were a few noticeable price decreases in the month's PATA hard drive list, including three double-digit cuts. The Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB fell by $21, while the Hitachi Deskstar 250GB and Seagate Barracuda 400GB dropped by $20 and $12, respectively. The aggregate chart decrease was only $71, or approximately half that of August's mark, and was the result of a horde of smaller price increases. Although none exceeded $7, these did put a damper on things, and provided a less-than exciting month for Parallel ATA hard drive prices.

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Page 1 September 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

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