As with other forms of technology, when new hard drives are released the cost of storage decreases across the board. The latest drives are usually significantly more expensive than older ones, even when looking at price per MB of storage.
This phenomenon has resulted in discerning buyers hunting for the ever-changing “sweet spot,” or optimum price versus performance purchase.
Generally hard-drives are among the easier forms of technology to evaluate in terms of “bang for buck” as it’s easy to calculate the amount of storage you get per Rand spent.
Capacity isn’t the only important specification of a hard disk. Performance-influencing factors such as the rotational speed, interface and cache size of a drive could also have an effect on the price.
In this article we specifically look at internal, serial ATA (SATA) hard drives for desktop computers.
These drives may rotate at speeds between 5,400 revolutions per minute (rpm) and 10,000 rpm, feature either a SATA2 or SATA3 interface and have cache sizes of 8, 16, 32, or 64 Megabytes (MB).
To determine the current sweet spot for internal desktop SATA drives, we looked at the pricing of three different online retailers. Considering the capacity, speeds, interfaces and cache sizes of the various drives, we pin-pointed the current sweet-spots.
Optimal capacity
Most hard drive manufacturers build a type of “green” drive which is aimed at temperature and power efficiency. These drives rotate at lower speeds (usually 5,400 or 5,900 rpm), with Western Digital saying that their drives automatically vary their speeds between 5,400 and 7,200 rpm.
While perhaps not the fastest drives, they seem to provide the most storage capacity for money spent at around R0.46 per Gigabyte (GB) to R0.55 in 1.5 Terabyte (TB) and 2 TB drives.
| SATA Hard Drives – “Green” models | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Make | Model | Capacity (GB) | Speed (rpm) | Cache (MB) | Indicative Price | R/GB |
| Samsung | HD154UI | 1500 | 5400 | 32 | R 671.67 | R 0.45 |
| Seagate | Barracuda Green | 2000 | 5900 | 32 | R 941.00 | R 0.47 |
| Samsung | EcoGreen F3 | 2000 | variable | 32 | R 931.00 | R 0.47 |
| Samsung | SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen | 2000 | 5400 | 32 | R 982.85 | R 0.49 |
| Seagate | Barracuda Green (SATA3) | 2000 | 5900 | 64 | R 1,011.64 | R 0.51 |
| Western Digital | Caviar Green | 2000 | 5400-7200 | 64 | R 1,054.85 | R 0.53 |
| Western Digital | Caviar Green | 1500 | 5400-7200 | 64 | R 802.20 | R 0.53 |
| Seagate | Barracuda Green (SATA3) | 1500 | 5900 | 64 | R 837.08 | R 0.56 |
| Western Digital | Caviar GP AV | 2000 | 5400-7200 | 32 | R 1,174.00 | R 0.59 |
| Western Digital | AV-GP | 1500 | 5400-7200 | 64 | R 942.87 | R 0.63 |
| Western Digital | Caviar Green | 3000 | 5400-7200 | 64 | R 2,609.10 | R 0.87 |
In general the best value is to be found in hard drives larger than 1.5TB (1,500GB), provided that one isn’t looking at enterprise or “enthusiast” drives.
| SATA Hard Drives – 7200rpm | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Make | Model | Capacity (GB) | Speed (rpm) | Cache (MB) | Indicative Price | R/GB |
| Seagate | Barracuda | 1500 | 7200 | 32 | R 760.19 | R 0.51 |
| Seagate | Barracuda | 1000 | 7200 | 32 | R 567.88 | R 0.57 |
| Samsung | D103UJ | 1000 | 7200 | 32 | R 576.61 | R 0.58 |
| Western Digital | Caviar Blue | 1000 | 7200 | 32 | R 662.83 | R 0.66 |
| Seagate | Barracuda | 500 | 7200 | 16 | R 370.00 | R 0.74 |
| Seagate | Barracuda XT (SATA3) | 2000 | 7200 | 64 | R 1,534.00 | R 0.77 |
| Western Digital | Caviar Black (SATA3) | 2000 | 7200 | 64 | R 1,736.31 | R 0.87 |
Hard drive prices in SA: Where’s the sweet spot? << Comments and views
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