Picked up a 200GB drive today from TigerDirect, for $150 with a $50 mail in rebate. Looks like the deal is good until Feb 6.

The drive is a Seagate 200GB drive 7200 rpm, with 8mb cache.

Beats Newegg's cheapest price. Looks like the Xbox is getting a needed upgrade.

Yeah, lots of good drive deals abound nowadays. Yesterday I received my Western Digital 160GB for $60 after $100 in rebates. It's only a 2mb cache model, but for what I'm using it for, that'll be more than enough, and I absolutely swear by WD's quality.. I think manufacturers are going to be pushing SATA drives soon and want to try to thin out the backlog of IDE's. I personally don't think there's much of a need for upgrades, but what do I know.

I think manufacturers are going to be pushing SATA drives soon and want to try to thin out the backlog of IDE's

Yeah, I recently built a hypothetical Dell system online for a friend in order to compare to building their own, and was suprised to see the default hard disk selection was an SATA drive. Plus, there was only a $50 difference to downgrade to the IDE drive which I think may have been smaller. So yeah, I think they're really pushing SATA. I like it a lot.

I was wondering, how do companies like Dell assemble their computers? Do humans put the cables in the right place? If they do, I imagine it would be nicer to connect thousands of SATA drives than IDE drives.

Do humans put the cables in the right place?

Yes. While machinery is used to move all the machines and pieces around the assembly plant, people actually assemble computers. Robotics aren't quite replacing people yet for these types of positions. Same as how there are still quite a few people working the assembly lines of car manufacturers.