WD 320GB SATA for $129.99 @ Best Buy

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For the $6 more, and not paying tax, I'd rather get it from Newegg, especially with the 16mb buffer, but if I needed one right away, the BB is a good deal for B&M
 
That's funny -- the model number's the same on both drives, but the one in the "old" packaging costs $10 less ($120 vs. $130 "sale" price, but same original price though...). Thanks for the heads-up....
 
The NewEgg drive is a SATA II w/16MB buffer. The BBuy drive is the older SATA I 8/MB.

Newegg's bargain is areal bargain. And for huge file, dvd, movie type storage, sataII on the NF4 is ALOT faster than sataI.
 
xX_Jack_Carver_Xx said:
The NewEgg drive is a SATA II w/16MB buffer. The BBuy drive is the older SATA I 8/MB.

Newegg's bargain is areal bargain. And for huge file, dvd, movie type storage, sataII on the NF4 is ALOT faster than sataI.
Click to expand...

It's cheaper at zipzoomfly

And can someone explain how an SATAII interface makes it much better than SATA? Everything I've read says that none of hte current drives can saturate the SATA interface, much less the SATA II.
 
nilepez said:
It's cheaper at zipzoomfly

And can someone explain how an SATAII interface makes it much better than SATA? Everything I've read says that none of hte current drives can saturate the SATA interface, much less the SATA II.
Click to expand...

That's what I've always heard. I got that particular sata1 8mb buffer drive at ZZF for like 125 w/free 2day a few months back... the ol' BB isn't exactly a scorching deal.
 
sataII is a touch faster than sata in real world benches... however, when you combine two to five sataII drives on the same channel with port multiplication (and I'm not talking about raid, but you can do that too) then you'll see a sharp increase in performance over a single sata drive on a single channel.
 
I am really thinking about going out today and picking 2 of these of for my HTPC/Server and I
just want to know this- "how much a differnce will I notice with bb 8mg buffer and Egg's 16mg
buffer?"
 
Tman said:
I am really thinking about going out today and picking 2 of these of for my HTPC/Server and I
just want to know this- "how much a differnce will I notice with bb 8mg buffer and Egg's 16mg
buffer?"
Click to expand...
2x the difference :D


i'm not really sure on how much differnce
 
RGFrog said:
sataII is a touch faster than sata in real world benches... however, when you combine two to five sataII drives on the same channel with port multiplication (and I'm not talking about raid, but you can do that too) then you'll see a sharp increase in performance over a single sata drive on a single channel.
Click to expand...

From anandtech
Anandtech Storage Price Guide said:
The obvious difference between the two is their bandwidth capabilities, with burst transfer rates being theoretically twice as fast on the newer standard. The problem is that SATA is a point-to-point protocol, so each drive gets a separate connection. Until we start seeing drives that can sustain transfer rates of over 150 GB/s, we're not going to saturate even the original SATA bandwidth.
Click to expand...

As a result, I do not believe that having multiple drives makes any difference. As they point out, the worlds fastest non-scsi drives are WD's Raptors, and those are SATA 1.5 drives.
 
nilepez, anand is only partially correct.

on a single drive, yes, there's little difference between ide, sata, and sata II... just like I said above. Even 10k drives don't saturate the bandwidth available on a single drive per connection situation. The same can be said for ANY hard drive, even SCSI.

Where things get interesting is with the sata II specs that allow for multiple drives (up to five per channel) on a single connection. With each drive using a typical 30-60 MB sustained, you'll be able to saturate the band. In RAID 0 you'll easily see more than 200MB/sec.

This is especially important if you're working with HD content in a production environment. With 5 external drives running off a single cable to your computer sustaining the necessary read and write rates for multiple HD streams, you're an editor in heaven. Not to mention that similar capacities and speeds in SCSI land being magnitudes more expensive, SATA-II is a god send.

Will it make your gaming faster. Nope. Does this mean you should go out and get SATA-II drives only...nope. However, SATA-II is the future, for now. It works just fine when connected to Sata 1.5, and will provide you with other options when hooked up to SATA-II controllers. So, if the price difference is negligable, then there's no reason to not purchase SATA-II devices... unless you're still working off a P3 and only have IDE ports.
 
From ZZF: here
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200KS 320GB Serial ATA II 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer. I got mines for 124.90 the other day with free 2 day air.
specs: here

Same one from newegg

One from best buy from OP: here
320 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB Cache WD3200JD
specs: here

Thought I'd combine some of the links together into one post
 
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa... WHOA!!!

The point of the thread wasn't to compare drives -- or to determine who had it cheapest -- but to mention that Best Buy had a sale on a SATA drive. When you consider the fact that it's Best Buy that we're talking about -- and that they decided to drop $70 off the price of one of their drives -- it's still a good deal (although I'll concede that it's not hot, which is why I didn't mention it as such...).

Besides, you all seem to have forgotten what I mentioned in the first post...


tiraides said:
[...] it's a pretty good deal, especially if you have to pick up a hard drive now.
Click to expand...
 
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