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 wide 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
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.
The start of 2006 showed very consistent Parallel ATA drive prices, but since then, things have really been heating up. April has been no different, and we have another seven double-digit price cuts to report, along with virtually no movement at the other end of the chart - the biggest price increase was only $4. The largest price cuts included $20 off the Hitachi 400GB, a $15 cut to the Maxtor DiamondMax 11 400GB, and a $12 drop to the Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB drive. The aggregate chart movement matches these figures and showed a $157 overall drop.
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