Price Guides, March 2005: Storage

SCSI Drives

Over the last couple of weeks, we spent significant amount of time working with our Price Engine bot to pick up the newest and most competitive SCSI hardware. Unlike the SATA and PATA hard drives, those who plan on buying high end SCSI hard drives probably are not nearly as worried about the cost per gigabyte. Seagate’s 15K.4 drives also started showing up on the market about the same time as their Barracuda 7200.8 ATA drives, and if you can stomach the $1200 price tag for the 146GB version [RTPE: ST3146854LC] and high pitched whine, nothing comes close to performance.


Fujitsu and Maxtor have some 15,000 RPM drives targeted at the 15K.4 series, but they haven’t quite shown up into retail space yet. From shows like IDF, we continue to hear more and more about the “magnetic bottleneck” on various high performance servers and workstations, and without a doubt, manufacturers are starting to respond with some very high end solutions to these problems. Hopefully, we are expecting to hear about some very neat stuff this summer.