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Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1639
Price Guides, March 2005: Storage
by Kristopher Kubicki on March 7, 2005 7:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Welcome back to another edition of the Price Guides. It’s been very long since we looked at any storage products on strictly a price basis, but now that next generation drives have picked up some availability, it’s about that time again. As another reminder, the RealTime Price Guides is leaving the beta testing phase, and moving into production real soon! Please send us your comments and suggestions on how we can improve our engine. Of course, you can always view the existing release of the engine here. Furthermore, you can view the still beta QuickSearch RSS feed forum thread here.
You might recall that we took our first look at the MaXLine III series back in June of last year and availability has been anything but consistent. There have been more NCQ drives on the market in the past couple of months, and of course, lots and lots of very big drives too. In mid-January, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 NCQ drives really started to hit the retail vendors in full force and since then, there have been some really excellent deals on performance Seagate drives.
All of those 16X DVD burners that were rushed out to market without any 16X write support have now been replaced by more capable 9 th generation drives. Pioneer and NEC both unleashed new revisions on their last burners, and the battle for 16X “round two” is all but over. We still have full details concerning this and previous generations of DVD burners in this week’s guide, but the choices are getting more and more obvious.
Serial ATA Hard Drives
The standard for choosing the best hard drive since the beginning has been to calculate the cost per gigabyte of the drive; what gives the most storage for the buck. Cache sizes and spin speed aside, most hard drives are created equally enough that 1GB of Brand A still equates to 1GB of Brand B. Just to get started, we compiled a short list of most of the serial ATA drives on the market today and their relative cost per GB.Keep in mind, our price engine constantly updates the prices on products, but the table above reflects the cost per GB of products that we listed on March 5 th, 2005. The SATA market is particularly interesting because most of the products are based on Parallel ATA devices that debuted two years ago or relatively new unbridged solutions like in the example of the 7200.8 Seagate drives. Features like NCQ and RAID aside, the real advantage of going with SATA is the new technology; there are more current generation drives on the SATA interface than on PATA. Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10 and MaXLine II products really dominate the price per gigabyte this month, but MaXLine III (NCQ) SATA drives are still shy on availability. 250GB drives clearly mark the sweet spot for price per storage on SATA drives.
Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10 drives incorporate “fluid bearing motors”, which really isn’t that unique for a hard drive (as any physicist will tell you, air is technically a fluid), but these are relatively quiet drives. On the other hand, Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.8 series drives are certainly nothing to scoff at either, particularly considering the 5-year warranty. Since the 7200.8s are relatively new, their cost per GB is a little high still, which makes it tough to recommend them just yet. But for those of us with the “Deathstar” memories fresh in our heads, seeing a manufacturer commit to five years of service on a product is a welcomed change for the better, and paying a little extra for that kind of commitment doesn’t seem like a bad idea in the long run. Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.8 or Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10 still retain our top recommendation for 250GB SATA drives.
The 300GB and 400GB hard drives have made considerable progress in lowering the cost per gigabyte over the last few months, and probably the best example of that is Hitachi’s older 400GB Deskstar 7K250 [RTPE: HDS724040KLSA80]. Over the last six months, the cost of this particular drive has dropped $150, which just illustrates that there is some fire left in competitive hard drive pricing, and you can see our tracking history below.
Parallel ATA Hard Drives
In each guide edition, we take special notice at the difference in price between PATA and SATA as a whole. Aside from what motherboard manufacturers would have us think, Parallel ATA drives aren’t going anywhere in the near future, and we only need to look at the number of MaXLine III and 7200.8 drives as proof of that. Obviously, there are no NCQ benefits on PATA, but for drives that cost anywhere between 5 and 10 cents less per GB than their SATA counterparts, the lack of advanced SATA features might be worth the trade off.There are a lot of choices to sift through when determining the best hard drive choice. Like with many things in computers, you’re penalized for considering older (but not obsolete) hardware, such as the 80GB and smaller drives. The 40GB and 60GB drives actually have worse price per gigabyte ratios, and one would have to be mad to buy an $80 60GB hard drive over a $60 80GB one.
Last generation’s DiamondMaxs, Caviars and Deskstars top our cost per Gigabyte charts for March, but surprisingly, the 160GB and 200GB marks are the sweet spots for PATA compared to the 250GB sweet spot for SATA drives. All PATA drives under 250GB are cheaper than their SATA counterparts, but the differences are now measured in one or two dollars compared to the 20% difference from a year ago.
We still don’t recommend going all out on 300GB or 400GB drives just yet, although the price has come down considerably (more so on the SATA variants).
SCSI Drives
Over the last couple of weeks, we spent significant amount of time working with our Price Engine bot to pick up the newest and most competitive SCSI hardware. Unlike the SATA and PATA hard drives, those who plan on buying high end SCSI hard drives probably are not nearly as worried about the cost per gigabyte. Seagate’s 15K.4 drives also started showing up on the market about the same time as their Barracuda 7200.8 ATA drives, and if you can stomach the $1200 price tag for the 146GB version [RTPE: ST3146854LC] and high pitched whine, nothing comes close to performance.Fujitsu and Maxtor have some 15,000 RPM drives targeted at the 15K.4 series, but they haven’t quite shown up into retail space yet. From shows like IDF, we continue to hear more and more about the “magnetic bottleneck” on various high performance servers and workstations, and without a doubt, manufacturers are starting to respond with some very high end solutions to these problems. Hopefully, we are expecting to hear about some very neat stuff this summer.
DVDR Drives
Is there any reason not to get a DVDR drive these days? 16X support on both formats (even though only one of them actually produces media), dual layer write speed at 4X or higher, and the drives are dirt cheap. The product cycle for any optical storage products is difficult to describe at best, but the 8 th – 9 th generation design phases are/were downright bizarre. A few months ago, we wrote a roundup between the major DVDR manufacturers, and even looking at all of those reviewed models that were 16X write capable, most are obsolete already. Pioneer, Sony, LiteOn and LG all have new revisions of their 16X drives with better servos and write strategies capable of 4X dual layer writes. In some instances, the older drives are slightly cheaper, but due to the particulars of optical storage distributors, those drives will probably be completely dried up even before you have the chance to buy them. Given that the 9 th generation drives available today are really nothing more than “fixed” versions of the previous generation, saving a couple of dollars over last year’s hardware doesn’t make a lot of sense. To add a little bit of icing to the cake, the 9 th generation drives from most of the major manufacturers have a speed bump in CD-R burn speed as well.We are working on another comprehensive DVDR roundup that should publish in the next couple weeks, but in the interim, we still recommend the NEC ND-3520A. Pioneer and NEC flip-flopped back and forth during the earliest days of the 8 th generation (16X DVD+R) drives, but with the introduction of the Pioneer DVR-109 [RTPE: DVR-109] and the NEC ND-3520A [RTPE: ND-3520A], no competitor has come close to the NEC drive as far as compatibility, stability and price. At publication, the ND-3520A retails for just under $60, and that’s a few bucks higher than last week’s price.
It’s not to say that other DVD drives are less capable than the ND-3520A or the DVR-109. The LG GSA-416 [RTPE: GSA-4163B] has an awesome price right now, considering the drive’s support for DVD-RAM. The only drawback on any LG drive is the less frequent firmware updates. Between NEC, LG or Pioneer, you won’t be disappointed and we hold a firm recommendation between the LG and the NEC drive. Stay tuned, of course, for the full DVDR roundup in the coming weeks!