Hard drive pricing is a definite factor in making a decision to purchase a hard disk drive. The thing is, you can’t just look for the best bargain without taking into consideration which hard drives have the best performance, storage capabilities and life time. So what are some of the factors that go into hard drive pricing?

Best Hard Drive Prices

When searching the Internet for hard drive pricing, you are going to find a ton of online shops that are offering major discounts on hard disk drives. When looking at internal hard drives (click the link if you are interested inexternal hard drives and their pricing) there are many options. Below is a list of the most common types of hard drives:

• Desktop IDE Hard Drive Pricing – a desktop hard drive goes into a standard tower and use IDE cables to transfer data between the hard disk and your computer’s motherboard. IDE hard drives (Integrated Disk Electronics) and even motherboards that use IDE connections are becoming a thing of the past. SATA is the I/O (input/output) of choice for the major computer manufacturers like Dell and HP. The fact is that there are still millions of computers in use and still being sold with IDE connections, so hard drive pricing for IDE drives might be going down and you can get a good value for them if you are still running IDE. Also external hard drive cases mostly come with IDE connections. Because of the I/O interface IDE is slower than SATA which is why new computer makers.
• SATA Serial ATA Hard Drive Pricing – SATA is used on both desktop and laptop hard drives. SATA hard drive prices are usually higher because of their higher performance. Even though the cable looks diffenernt on a SATA it is still an IDE I/O standard.
• Solid State Storage Pricing – solid state storage is now being used in laptops and other portable devices replacing traditional hard drives. The pricing is much higher, but they are more reliable because there are no moving parts link on a hard disk drive.
• SCSI hard drive pricing – SCSI hard drives which stands for small computer system interface is a protocol is a solid system which is both fast and reliable. SCSI is the most expensive hard disk with moving parts with a second to none burst rate.

Hard Drive Pricing From Cost Per MB to Cost Per GB

How times changes! Just in the last decade alone we have seen hard drive prices go from cost per MB (megabyte) to cost per GB (gigabyte). The amount of storage has also risen at an incredible rate due to the need for people to store pictures, video and music. A few years ago a user wouldn’t have conceived of needing 500GB worth of space on their hard disk drive. Now we need to span 500GB drives together to get a TB (terabyte) of storage for all of videos and music files. Gamers have also influenced the industry demanding more performance and size.

Here is a look at how the hard drive pricing has changed in the last 20 years:

• Hard Drive Prices in the 1980′s – in the mid 80′s Iomega hard drives that had a whopping 10MB of storage cost $899.00! For those not into doing the math that’s $90.00 per MB! By the end of the 80′s Western Digital released a 40MB hard drive for $1199.00 bringing the cost per MB to $36.00.
• Hard Drive Prices in the 1990′s – as it became apparent in the 90′s that computers were headed to the mainstream, more companies started making hard disk drives. In 1995 Seagate released their first 1GB hard drive for $849.00 making the cost per MB 85¢. By the end of the decade the price per MB remained under 10¢ with the most notable hard drive released being by Quantum with 8GB of storage at about 4¢ per MB. The finalhard drive price we will look at as far as cost per MB is Fujitsu’s new IDE hard drive that boasted an unprecedented 28GB of storage for a mere $388.00 bringing the cost per MB to 2¢.
• Present Hard Drive Pricing – looking at the time after the millennium the hard drive pricing will be factored by cost per GB. Right out of the gate in 2001 Fujitsu was selling a  20GB hard drive for $299.00 with a cost of $17 per GB. In 2004 hard drive prices fell to around a dollar per GB with Western Digital 250GB hard disk costing $249.99 which is around $1GB. We will be exploring the current hard drive pricing by hard drive type, storage capacity, etc. in future posts.

Hard Drive Pricing – Shopping Online VS Shopping At Retail Outlet

What is the best choice for most consumers? Well taking away factors like if you have a CompUSA or Best Buy in your area, most of us have the choice of buying online or going to our local retail store to purchase a hard drive. Are their any benefits to shopping in a retail store other than not having to pay for shipping?

Not really. There is no difference if you buy a hard drive from a retail outlet in your neighborhood, or shopping online. We get hundreds of hard drives shipped to us every week and have never had a hard drive that was damaged by the shipping process. Today there are hard drive packaging techniques that prevent any damage to the hard drive throughout shipping.

So the answer is Online shopping because you can compare the pricing between your retail stores and multiple online vendors. We will be posting our reviews of not only hard drives, but of retail and online vendors throughout the month and linking to them here.