February 2007 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 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

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 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.

The Parallel ATA hard drive chart for February keeps with the overall 2007 trends, and the majority of hard drive prices are at, or near, where they were since the start of the new year. There were only two double-digit price drops, which included a $23 cut to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drive, and a $13 decrease on the price of a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB. There is a large set of smaller price drops, but the real bad news came on the other end of the chart, as we posted four price increases that hit double-digits. The aggregate chart movement reflected this, displaying only a $25 total drop, one of the lowest we've ever seen.

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