April 1999 Ultra ATA Hard Drive Comparison: Part 1

Price per Megabyte Comparison

For those users that are simply interested in storage space, the 20GB Western Digital Caviar offers the most bang for your buck, weighing in at around $0.015 per megabyte of storage space. The higher performing Expert 9.1GB offers the worst storage value bearing the Western Digital name, it is a small price to pay for killer performance. The Maxtor DiamondMax and the Fujitsu drives offer reasonable alternatives to Western Digitals Caviar for users that are looking for affordable hard disk storage space.

In this introductory roundup, the Western Digital Expert 9.1 proved to be the best overall performer due to its 7200 RPM spin rate, impressive 2MB cache, and Ultra ATA/66 interface protocol. If you need an even larger storage capacity, the Expert series is available in an 18GB flavor as well, for an added premium of course. Unfortunately, the Price Comparison shows that the Expert is not the most economical, leaving the cheaper 5400 RPM alternatives to be the ideal solutions for most users on budgets. The 7200 RPM IBM Deskstar 14GXP is a bit cheaper than the Expert, and does offer an in-between capacity of 14.4GB making it another alternative to WD's latest concoctions.

Users just looking for the most bang for their buck will probably find themselves at home with the 20.4GB Caviar drive from WD, in many cases it outperforms the rest of the competition due to its 2MB buffer and design. How will things change when IBM's Ultra ATA/66 drives hit the market? Western Digital has had a series of failures in the past with their cheaper Caviar drives, let's see how far the new Expert line can pull them out of their grave before the competition steps in to make things a bit more interesting. Until next time...