December 2005 Hard Drive Price Guide

Introduction

Welcome to the Sharky Extreme Hard Drive Price Guide, which is a monthly feature that complements 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 400GB and 500GB 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 160GB to 300GB 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.

The price increases outpaced the decreases this week, and our PATA hard drive chart definitely showed the effects. The aggregate price total jumped $27, which is the first time we've seen higher overall prices in this area. There were a few double-digit price cuts, and the Samsung 80GB and Seagate 120GB drives fell by $11 each, but this was more than offset by price jumps to the Western Digital SE 300GB and Hitachi 500GB drives, which increased by $15 and $21, respectively.

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