Price Guides August 2003 Part II: Hard Drives and Memory
by Kristopher Kubicki on September 2, 2003 3:46 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The interesting thing about hard drives this week is that the 120GB drives on both IDE and SATA channels cost about the same. The mere $10 premium between Seagate’s 120GB drive seem worth it to go with the SATA version, but understandably not everyone has compatible motherboards. As you will see from our charts, the 8MB buffer costs about 10% more over 2MB cache drives, but it certainly is not a necessity. In fact, if you plan on using your drive for simple storage (like an MP3 server), you really do not even need to invest the extra money in neither 7200RPM nor 8MB cache.
We recommend grabbing a high performance 80GB drive for a new system drive (to hold the OS, games, etc) and then purchasing a slower, larger drive for storage. Maxtor’s incredibly massive 300GB hard drive debuted very recently with only 5400RPM and 2MB buffer. Although it is slow, it will run cooler and perhaps outlast two 160GB drives (while costing the same).
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SUOrangeman - Tuesday, September 2, 2003 - link
I was a bit surprised by the Raptor comments as well.I have no reason to believe that StorageReview's numbers are less than credible, and they state that the Raptor does its job quite well. And let's not forget the superior warranty.
-SUO
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 2, 2003 - link
Any chance you'll be including SCSI drives in the future?Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 2, 2003 - link
The price comparisons states " Just as we stated several months ago the Western Digital Raptor 36.7GB 10,000RPM drive really does not cut it as far as performance, and does not justify the extraordinary cost.:"The article it links you to though refutes this as Anand himself states "With write caching enabled and with the production level optimizations present in the drive's firmware, the Raptor is now the fastest desktop drive we've laid our hands on.
Well, which is it?