Price Guides June 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage

SCSI

This time around, we thought that we would throw in the requisite SCSI technology. While SCSI hasn't been as active recently in improving its performance, capacity, or other specifications the way that some SATA devices have, the prices still fluctuate and are worth keeping an eye on if you need the reliability and throughput that SCSI devices can offer. The pricing engine does not currently track as many SCSI drives as it does SATA/PATA, which narrows this guide's range of products, but this will be changing as we add new products and improve tracking of others in the future.

If you simply need a drive from which to boot or for running a few choice applications, the 36.7 GB size drives should fit the bill. This drive size seems to stay fairly consistent price-wise across manufacturers and does not show any major changes within the last few weeks. Of course, this does depend on the spindle speed with which you choose. In any case, the Fujitsu Ultra320 models are priced very well in the 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM flavors and can give you that needed boost to run mission critical applications such as small databases, CRM systems, and they will work well for the enthusiast gamer or video editor.