March 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 (as noted) 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 200GB to 320GB 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.

After experiencing a slow start to 2006, Parallel ATA hard drive prices are continuing to heat up. Last month we saw a bit of movement, and March has shifted this into high gear. There are nine price cuts that reached double digits, with no PATA drive increasing by more than $5. The aggregate chart total followed these trends, dropping by a very healthy $181. Some of the larger cuts included the Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB (-$22), Hitachi Deskstar 500GB (-$21), and Maxtor DiamondMax 11 400GB (-$20) hard drives.

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Page 1 March 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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