About six months have passed since the very first mainboards with Serial ATA-150 controller appeared on the retail market. Today, the first bunch of HDDs with Serial ATA-150 support appeared for sale in the Country of The Rising Sun, as I discovered over this web-site. The first company to bring the Serial ATA-150 hard disk drive to the market is Maxtor, who started to sell the DiamondMax 9 series “6Y120M0” model, announced back in early September (see this news-story).

The DiamondMax “6Y120M0” is a 120GB HDD with 7200rpm motor, 8MB of cache and 9ms average seek-time. Just as Maxtor promised earlier this year, they now start shipping their drives with Serial ATA support worldwide.

Due to an unknown reason, Japanese retailers sell the HDDs only with Serial ATA-150 add-in controllers. Even those, who already paid for Serial ATA-150 support with their mainboards, also have to purchase additional controllers. Therefore, Serial ATA devices are not so cheap, especially considering the prices of the disks themselves at the moment. Definitely, the retailers try to make additional money on those hardware enthusiasts, who cannot wait several weeks and want to get the newest HDDs now.

As you may notice over here, the cheapest set of a HDD and a Promise 2-ports Serial ATA-150 controller costs ¥32780 or approximately $270, while the most expensive set of an advanced 12-port controller and two HDDs is priced at ¥189600 ($1560). Keeping in mind that a Serial ATA-150 controller from Promise costs from $50 to $60, we can easily guess the price of a 120GB HDD from Maxtor with Serial ATA-160 support is more than $200.