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 an extensive 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 Western Digital 10K Raptor and 5400/7200 RPM Hybrid 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) for easy look-up.
February was a very slow month for Parallel ATA hard drive prices, and the overall change was almost a wash - reaching only an $8 aggregate chart decrease. This represents a vast improvement over the $114 chart *increase* we posted last month, but still nothing to get excited about. There was only a single price cut that hit double digits - the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB fell by $15 - along with a nice selection of smaller drops. Two drives jumped by similar amounts, as the Maxtor Ultra 16 300GB and Maxtor DiamondMax 21 320GB increased by $23 and $15, respectively. Due to these individual results, the slim overall change is not surprising.
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