Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1312
Price Guides May 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage
by Kristopher Kubicki on May 2, 2004 7:18 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Welcome to this week's edition of our Price Guides. This guide will be covering storage in the form of hard drives and DVDR's and point out some recent advances in these technologies. As usual, be sure to check out our RealTime Pricing Engine for the latest prices and deltas.
SATA Hard Drives
As memory prices continue their journey upward, storage prices have been moving very slowly and in some cases actually dropping. In the past months we have seen everything from slashed prices to huge manufacturer rebates on virtually any size and type of hard drive imaginable, save for the occasional hike. This is great news since not only has the cost per gigabyte of storage gone down overall, but performance has gone up as well with the introduction of greater platter densities and larger disk buffers.
Serial ATA drives have also become more obvious in the marketplace with models appear on shelves right next to their PATA brethren and usually at very similar prices. With drives such as the Western Digital Raptors showing the world what SATA can do and how much room it has to get even better, we expect to see more SATA drives being chosen over classic PATA as consumers build new systems and upgrade old ones as long as prices continue to stay competitive.
While the cost of stashing that massive music or home video collection have been more enticing lately, the price of performance continues to be within reach of the average prosumer thanks to Western Digital. When it comes down to it, the Raptor series drives are the best you can get short of making the dive into SCSI devices. These drives sport a 10,000 RPM spindle speed along with an 8 MB buffer compared to other drives which are usually either 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM. At around $110 for the 36.7GB version and $220 for the 74GB version, the Raptor certainly isn't the cheapest of drive weighing in at almost $3 per gigabyte, but what they lack in price they make up for in raw performance. You also gain the luxury of extremely simple setup thanks to the SATA design and very simple cabling to keep your machine looking clean inside.
If you simply can't resist SATA there are some options in this category which are well worth consideration especially since motherboards have started to more frequently show up with SATA built right in even with RAID controllers. Western Digital makes a solid 200GB SATA drive at 7200RPMs and an 8MB cache for just under 70 cents per gigabyte. For the price of $140 200GB of space is certainly a good offer for a technology as new as SATA.
Concerning RAID: often we are asked if it is worth it to buy two 36.7GB drives and RAID them together for performance. Our answer is no; the performance increases are minute, but your stability issues are horrible. Suppose your drives have a 5% failure rate after 1 year. If you RAID two of your drives together the failure rate of your stripe jumps to 9.75% (compare this to just buying one big drive with a failure rate of 5%). Do you mind playing a 1 in 10 chance of loosing your data for single digit percentage performance increases? Granted, there are plenty of uses for RAID (DB servers, fileservers, etc), but workstation performance is not one of them.
PATA Hard Drives
Since the capacity from Raptors can be a little less than fulfilling for those with massive collections of files or those just working with extremely large files, PATA is still the cost effective way to go for mass storage. For this reason a 160GB drive from Maxtor comes to mind. Specifically the Maxtor ATA133 160GB 7200RPM 8MB drive. At a little over 60 cents per gigabyte this becomes much more affordable to the average user who values space over speed. That doesn't mean that this drive slacks either. The 7200 RPM spindle and 8MB cache help keep data flowing quite readily. The same spec drive from Western Digital also appears for about the same price as the Maxtor, with Seagate following close behind. All of these drives will fit into or near the $100 price point without sacrificing transfer rates and slowing you down.
Since it's not always wise to put too many eggs in one basket and load up all of your precious data onto a single hard drive, even with the increased reliability that manufacturers have developed over the years it may not be too attractive to run out and purchase a 250-300+ gig drive. Of course if you are short on open bays in your case and need a lot of space we recommend Maxtor for their 300 gig drive. At only 5400 RPMs and only 2MB cache it certainly isn't going to set any speed records but it will store a lot of data without breaking the bank completely. This size drive is also very well suited for external enclosures such as those used for external backups or transferring large files between home, work, or a friend's computer. Remember, if you're just using a drive for extra storage and not particularly for your system drive, low RPM and low cache do not really hurt performance.
DVD Burners
Now that you've bought your massive new hard drive, how are you going to back up that much data? CDs certainly won't be much fun if you have more than 1-2 gigs to back up (even with HD CD at 1.4GB a disc) and tape drives are slow dinosaurs of the past. Thankfully, DVD burners have come down in price almost where CD burners were little more than a year and a half ago. In fact, there are still some 4x DVD burners that cost *less* than a few CD burners.
Since we have all grown accustomed to blazing fast CD write times, we won't even discuss 4x DVD burners at this point, but instead jump right into 8x. With a total capacity of 4.7 gigs per disc and media prices slowly falling DVDs are finally becoming a viable medium for sending large files to friends or family and for making backups. The ability to make backups of your expensive DVD or game collection so that the kids don't scratch up the originals is worth the investment on its own merit.
Our recent DVD roundup goes into full detail on the exact performance and quality that you can expect from six different models. As you may recall, the NuTech DDW-082 won the Editor's Choice award in that roundup and certainly wins the seal of approval for its price as well. For $75 you fairly decent media compatibility, 8x DVD-/+R, 4x DVD-/+RW, and 4x DVD-/+RW (we can only dream of the day when the industry and marketplace chooses +, -, or something else to settle on) burn speeds as well as very acceptable CDR burn speeds of 40x. The media compatibility really isn't too much of an issue since most buyers tend to at least get a brand they recognize to help avoid filling your living room with 4.7GB coasters, no matter how amused guests may be. This drive can easily replace every optical drive in your system without losing any noticeable performance on CDs and while getting great DVD performance. If NuTech isn't your thing, the NEC ND-2500A/AOpen DDW8800 are also excellent drives for the price, but generally burn slower than the DDW-082.
Another interesting burner to consider is the LG GSA-4082B; simply because it's the cheapest triformat burner around. DVD-RAM isn't a particularly widely support format, but most new PC DVD drives are shipping with read support for DVD-RAM so the option is there if you need it.
And what about DVD Dual Layer that we reported on a month ago? Patience grasshopper. First samples will be showing up at review sites this week, but issues of media and software support still concern us. DVDR-9 (DVD Dual Layer) will also be considerably slower than the 8X speeds (and soon 12X speeds) on the market right now. With 8X DVDR-5 drives as cheap as they are (and falling), media practically free and software support mature, why wait?
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