This May we’ve conducted some price comparisons to determine the best price per gig for IDE and SATA hard drives, by the major manufacturers, available from online vendors. Before you shop at Best Buy, or another retail store, you should consider purchasing from an online vendor such as newegg.com or mwave.com. More importantly, no matter where you buy be armed with information on current pricing.

To determine what the best deal is, you need to consider the price-per-gig. If you are in the market for a specific storage capacity then you will need to calculate your price-per-gig for all drives on the market within that capacity. To get the best deal, it is necessary to be more flexible in regards to drive capacity. The market is based on a bell curve, where the lowest and highest capacity drives are not as good of a deal as the middle capacity drives.

In short, for this May, 2006 the best deals on IDE and SATA drives are for capacities of 250gig and 320gig at 33 cents per gig.

Our comparison was conducted using newegg.com as the online vendor, because their average prices are lower than the other major vendors we have investigated. The only exception is mwave.com, which also offers prices similar to newegg.com.

Here is some sample data for ATA100 drives:

$0.32 per gig 250 gig
Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JB 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM
$0.33 per gig 320 gig
Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200JB 320GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM
$0.35 per gig 250 gig
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3250824A 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM
$0.36 per gig 250 gig
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
$0.41 per gig 160 gig
HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 HDT722516DLA380 (0A31637) 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
$0.44 per gig 200 gig
Western Digital Caviar SE WD2000JB 200GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM
$0.45 per gig 400 gig
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3400832A 400GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM
$0.50 per gig 160 gig
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3160812A 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM
$0.55 per gig 120 gig
Western Digital Caviar WD1200BB 120GB 7200 RPM 2MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM

Pricing for SATA was also collected and matched for drives of 250gig to 320gig capacities.

trc contributor: Derek Winterstien

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 4:26 pm and is filed under PC/Components. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.