Price Guide, July 2006: Storage

Introduction

Greetings and thanks for joining us in this week's price guide. This time around, we'll be taking a look at most of your basic storage necessities, including hard drives with various interfaces and your most common external storage means: optical drives.

For all our price guides, we use our RTPE for reference. It not only tracks current pricing, but it also tracks price changes, available rebates, shipping fees; refurbished, OEM and retail products, and we also keep a historical log of prices. Unlike other price searches which are more interested in per click revenue, with our RTPE, we are interested in getting you the best product at the best price.

We are the only engine to use our own in-house created bots which crawl thousands of links an hour, gathering pricing data directly from vendors rather than collecting data from XML feeds and FTP servers, as many other engines do. This allows our users to have the most accurate information regarding not only pricing and shipping costs, but also product availability. There are few things that can be more irritating than ordering a product only to find it is out of stock, or that the vendor with the best price is backordered. Speaking of vendors, our RTPE only tracks companies that we feel are reliable, and the list consists of highly recommended and rated merchants. Since we don't collect any revenue for link traffic to these vendors, we are free to use merchants that have aggressive pricing rather than deep advertising pockets.

As per many requests from our loyal readers, we are still working on getting laptop hard drives into our RTPE. However, that task is not yet complete; rest assured that once it's ready, we will be sure to include that market segment in our storage price guides. We know many users also have a laptop or two, and some of them could use a hard drive upgrade/replacement.

One last thing before we get caught up in the midst of all these storage options. We realize that the pricing tables on the following pages do not allow better sorting options like the RTPE does, as all of the tables are listed in alphabetical order. The main thing that you will find in the RTPE is the cost per GB breakdown, as well as the ability to sort by price. This makes finding the best storage deals extremely easy, and we will provide a few direct links to the RTPE for lists sorted by price. We're still working on getting that functionality into our article tables, and hope to have that in the near future.

Now enough about our pricing engine and let's get back on track about what this guide is about. Starting off this storage guide, we'll first take a look at the SATA drives.