September 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 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

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) for easy look-up.

The Parallel ATA drive chart hasn't been very busy in 2008, but it has been a bit more active of late. Last month we had seven price drops that hit double digits, and this month we're looking at six more. The largest is a $25 cut to the Western Digital Caviar 200GB drive, while the Seagate DB35 7200.3 500GB (-$19) and Western Digital Caviar SE16 320GB (-$17) models weren't far behind. The price increases were numerous as well, with five of them in double-digit territory, including a pair of $27 spikes to the Western Digital RAID Ed. 250GB and Seagate Barracuda RK 750GB drives. This led to a rather sedate month and the overall chart increased by an aggregate total of $28.

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Page 1 September 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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