Price Guide, July 2006: Storage

SATA - 1.5Gbps

We'll move on to the 1.5Gbps SATA drives now. Some of our readers have asked us what the differences between these and the 3.0Gbps drives are and which drive they should select, so we'll gladly explain it here:

At this point the difference between the 1.5Gbps and 3.0Gbps interfaces is a moot point as sustained transfer rates have yet to exceed 150 MB/s (or even 100 MB/s), the limit for the 1.5Gbps drives. This means that the transfer rates for the 1.5Gbps drives aren't bottlenecking their performance, so a 3.0Gbps drive won't show any performance increase in this area. The newer 3.0Gbps drives are better in a few cases, but that's due to innovations such as increased platter densities, not the SATA interface.

If your motherboard only supports the 1.5Gbps interface and not the newer 3.0Gbps standard, don't worry. The 3.0Gbps drives are backwards compatible with motherboards supporting the 1.5Gbps interface, so choose whichever drive will give you more bang for your buck without worrying too much about that factor. Some drives also have a jumper block that can be used to force 1.5Gbps mode if necessary.

Another question we were asked was, "Since the interfaces don't impact performance, then why do you tend to separate the 1.5 and 3.0Gbps drives?" The answer's fairly simple: the charts we place in our guides are already overwhelming as is, or so we've been told. ;-) Throwing together the 1.5Gbps and 3.0Gbps drives all on one page will just make it that much more hectic, so we divide them up via SATA interface to minimize the insanity. For those that are interested, here's a list of the SATA 1.5Gbps sorted by Price/GB.


As you can see, the prices here are just about even with the 3.0Gbps drives -- although we are seeing increasingly better deals with the newer SATA 3.0Gbps models. There are a few good deals on 320GB drives, such as the Western Digital 1.5Gbps 320GB 7200RPM 8MB Caviar SE [RTPE: WD3200JD] which is currently priced at about $113 ($0.35/GB). The Western Digital 1.5Gbps 320GB 7200RPM 8MB Caviar RE [RTPE: WD3200SD] is also selling for about $113 ($0.35/GB). Unless prices drop further on drives with these capacities, or you have a specific need a getting a drive with the older SATA 1.5Gbps standard, you should refer to the previous page and get an SATA 3.0Gbps drive.


There are some well-priced drives within the 400GB category, and this time prices are actually cheaper on drives with the older interface. The Western Digital 1.5Gbps 400GB 7200RPM 16MB Caviar RE2 [RTPE: WD4000YR] is going for about $140 ($0.35/GB). The Western Digital 1.5Gbps 400GB 7200RPM 16MB Caviar SE16 [RTPE: WD4000KD] is also a decent solution - the going rate for this drive is for $150 after a $20 mail-in rebate.


Here's everyone's favorite 10,000 RPM SATA drive series, the Western Digital Raptor. Performance is better in some tasks, but you sacrifice storage capacity for the higher spindle speed. The cheapest Price/GB on the Raptor line belongs to the 150GB models, and it's still about five times as much as the most popular SATA solutions ($1.66/GB), so you'll really want to give careful thought to whether or not a Raptor (or two) is truly your best upgrade option. For the highest end PCs, it's a reasonable choice, but we'd recommend spending the money elsewhere if you're looking to keep prices in check.

As with the other SATA drives, here's a list of all the available 1.5Gbps drives that are listed in our pricing engine. You can also find them sorted by price if you're basically just looking for any hard drive to put in a system.