Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1514




Introduction

Welcome back for this week's edition of the Price Guides. In a time when the high tech industry is constantly making strides towards streamlining their manufacturing processes and boosting efficiency and yield, it's odd to see the prices of storage devices rising so consistently across the board. While it's still possible to find some really good deals, such as Comp USA's recent 60GB Maxtor HDD that was $30 out the door (no rebates), the majority of storage devices seem to be hiking up their sticker prices enough to be noticed and felt by the more budget-conscience buyers among us. Even if cost isn't a major issue, there's still no reason why you shouldn't try to get the best sale possible.

This week, we will take a look at prices for hard drives and DVD burners to help you determine which storage products will provide you with the most bang for your buck.

As usual, be sure to check out our RealTime Pricing Engine to view the latest prices available among our engine's quality retailers.




DVD Burners: High-End

It seems like only yesterday when everyone was scrambling to get their hands on the latest, greatest, and fastest CD burner that they could afford. The excitement of upgrading from a seemingly ancient 4x CD burner to one that screamed along at 8X was enough to keep everyone glued to the ads in their local Sunday paper, in hopes of finding the best deal around.

Today is no exception to the past, except that the speeds have changed, and DVDs have finally started to nudge their way onto store shelves. Actually, "nudge" might be a bit of an understatement, since the media aisle at any Fry's Electronics tends to be about 50/50, CD to DVD. While a lot of people still use their burners primarily to bring their music with them on the road, or to transfer mid-sized files from one place to another, DVDs have had a relatively slow adoption rate. Let's face it; most of us don't have car stereos that know the difference between a CD and a Frisbee. Luckily, the biggest names in the PC industry have all but dropped CD drives altogether in favor of, no less, a DVD-ROM drive. What this means to you as the consumer is that prices will go down as adoption picks up a speedier pace. Unfortunately, today isn't the day when you can pick up a 52X DVD burner for $30 from any online retailer.

For that reason, we had to pick a drive that best suited the needs of a typical power user. Top burn quality, fast burns and reasonable pricing bring the NEC 16X ND-3500A to light as one of the best burners available for the price. Dual-layer capable, fast 16X burn capacity, and great media and format compatibility are among the key points that help make this drive a great choice. If you want the best of the best and don't mind paying a bit more for it, the NEC 16X ND-3500A is just what you're looking for. While the NEC is capable of writing a little quicker, an alternative choice for a few dollars less is the Pioneer 16X DVR-108D, which has slightly better media support compared to the NEC. In the end, either drive is top of the line and capable of keeping your distant relatives fully stocked with your home videos year round.

It is also worth noting that many 8X and 12X burners are selling for as much and, in some cases, more than either the 3500A or the 108D, which is why we see no reason to hold off from going with the newer devices.






Hard Drives: Parallel ATA

On a cost-per-gigabyte basis, hard drives are cheaper today than they have been in some time. If you can find the right deal, HDD storage capacity can be had for 50 cents per gigabyte or even less. If you are turning to the web for the holy grail of hard drive deals, then Seagate's ATA 100160GB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive is a great choice for anyone with a lot of files that need to be stored. Seagate is currently known for their 5-year warranties while most other HDD manufacturers are only offering one to three years of warranty coverage on new drives. There's not too much to say about this Seagate product, but what little there is to say is obviously positive. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the larger the drive, the harder it will fall. This is yet another case where putting RAID, or some other kind of backup procedure, into place is a good idea. Many can remember losing gigs of data due to nothing more than a malfunctioning hard drive. Many more wish that they had had backups when it happened.

With storage prices relatively low and with the growing adoption of DVD burners, there really isn't a reason any more to not have your critical data backed up safely.






Hard Drives: SATA

Nearly every time a newer motherboard is sold, another user becomes a candidate for the use of Serial ATA hard drives. With that kind of widespread adoption from motherboard manufacturers, and with SATA add-in controller cards available for next to nothing, SATA is poised to accept its new position as the standard in consumer data storage. There is currently no real-world benefit to using SATA, since the disks are usually the same as their PATA brothers except for the physical interface. This means that the seek times are rarely different and that you are protecting your storage investment for a longer period of time by making the switch. With prices nearly identical to PATA drives of the same capacity and overall performance, there's no reason to avoid SATA as it will eventually become the de-facto standard.

So to get the most out of your storage system, drives such as the Samsung U150 160GB 7200RPM 8MB can be had for under $100 and still give you the most storage capacity for your money.

If performance is your goal, then the Western Digital Raptor series of hard drives is the best option available for xATA-based devices. Specifically, the 74GB variant is known to compete very well with some of the fastest SCSI drives out there. Also worth mentioning is the Maxtor U150 300GB 7200RPM 16MB, which, while not the most cost effective drive on the market, is able to boost its performance through caching.






Hard Drives: SCSI

In the land of SCSI, not much has changed over the years. SCSI still provides the best available performance for disk-bound enterprise applications and it still carries with it the price premium that it has carried for its entire existence. But with drives like Seagate's Savvio coming to the market, it is nice to see that there is still room left for innovation and improvement.

This week, Fujitsu's Ultra320 36.7GB 10000RPM 8MB drive comes up as the best value for the lower end of the SCSI selection. Lower end refers only to the capacity and spindle speed when compared to other options that SCSI can offer. This isn't to say that it doesn't continue to out-perform just about any ATA based drive, outside of the Western Digital Raptors.

Unless you are buying parts for some type of server that can really benefit from SCSI under high loads, such as databases or other highly disk intensive applications, 10,000RPMs is usually enough. Additionally, this is only the 36.7GB capacity being referenced. The reason why we chose to point out this particular drive size is that the area of around 40GB seems to be the minimum drive size for most new systems these days. Once you go beyond 36.7GB, however, prices do not scale linearly, which makes SCSI still less attractive than the right ATA solution, when it comes to mass storage that doesn't require heavy traffic.



Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now