Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1250
Price Guides February 2004: Magnetic and Optical Storage
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 25, 2004 4:19 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Welcome to another installment of the weekly Price Guides. We have not done a whole lot with storage lately so we are going to take some time to reflect on what is going on in the magnetic and optical storage industry. As always, don't forget to check out our Real Time Price Engine for up to the minute price deltas and listing.
We start today with our cross section of Serial ATA hard drives. Prices have not changed much over the last few months (the page may state that our week delta is Not Available, this is just a small glitch that will probably be fixed in the next day or two). For those of you who watch our news feeds, you know that Maxtor recently disclosed its unbridged SATA drives at IDF. This opens the door to new opportunities in the SATA technology since there is no longer a separate chip needed to control the SATA interface on the hard drive. Keep in mind that VIA, Intel and NVIDIA are all working on moving their SATA controllers right onto the southbridge as well. SATA will soon become a two point technology whereas last year it was four point.
Undoubtly, choosing the right hard drive is not as easy as just picking the cheapest hard drive for the size desired. Without a doubt, the best performing drive on the market right now is the new Raptor WD740GD, albeit expensive. 74GB does not go as far as it did several years ago, but if you need a good system drive to put your OS and majority of applications, nothing beats the Raptors right now. If you are looking for something with a little more modest performance, perhaps for an additional drive rather than a system build, IDE still reigns champion for its low cost.
Recently leaked memos from Maximum PC have been the cause of debate for the last few weeks. Sheller has the unabridged article here for your reading pleasure. Obviously, this has caused an unfriendly stir in the storage community. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the situation, there basically have been some unusual memos leaked from IBM that claim IBM insiders knew of problems with Deskstar hard drives, but decided to cover it up with marketing. This does not only look bad on IBM, but the whole storage community.
This comes right on the heels of Fujitsu's $43M settlement where it was discovered Fujitsu drives manufactured between 2000 and 2001 were built with faulty controller chips. Read more here.
Fortunately, even though the IDE market has been fairly tainted with scandal and lawsuits, the drives produced today are quite good. If you are looking for a stable, inexpensive drive primarily for additional storage, there are a lot of good IDE solutions. Our particular favorite this week is the 160GB Western Digital with 2MB buffer. Several sources have indicated the 2MB edition does not cripple the drives nearly as much as WD or Maxtor would like us to believe. For $100, you cant go wrong.
We just got into tracking optical drives with our tracking engine, so do not be offended if we did not include your particular drive of preference. Recordable DVD drives have undergone immense changes since February of 2003. We effectively quadrupled our speed in a relatively short period of time. Let us not forget that 12X DVD+R drives are very close to an announcement with 16X DVD+R very close behind.
We have two choices for drives this week. Our first drive option is the Plextor 708A. This drive stunned us all as one of the first drives with 8X DVD+R capabilities. Reliable performance and a good price also contributed to our affinity for the drive. However, we should not neglect another favorite of ours, the NuTech DDW-081. The DDW-081 was not originally capable of DVD-R write, but after several months of research and programming, NuTech finally got it right and released a public firmware upgrade. You can check out the firmware here. Kudos to both Plextor and NuTech.
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