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 500GB and 750GB 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 250GB 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 for easy look-up.
It was another very good month for Parallel ATA hard buyers, and although we don't have the larger price cuts of the Serial ATA market, an aggregate chart drop of $198 is still good news. There were five double-digit cuts in June, all of them to the higher capacity drives. These included a $44 drop to the Seagate 7200.10 750GB, while the Hitachi Deskstar 400GB and 500GB drives fell by $27 and $41, respectively. It was even better news at the other end of the scale, where we didn't find even a single noticeable price increase, and the largest was only $5.
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