Price Guides September 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage

Hard Drives: SCSI

Where would the world be without SCSI? The Internet would certainly be a slower place without it and it does have its place even as some options, such as the Western Digital Raptors, try to edge it out. Extremely fast seek times and optimized read/write patterns make these drives ideal for any system that will be handling massive I/O, such as database servers, high-volume websites, or corporate file servers. Pair these drives with a quality RAID controller, and the performance and reliability move upwards at speeds that would leave ATA in the dust... depending on application of course.

SCSI is still more of a server architecture than a desktop or home-oriented one. For this reason, if all you want to do is play games, watch movies, and encode video or music, then SATA/PATA is still a much more cost-effective route. Otherwise, SCSI can offer many benefits, least of which is a longer warranty than what ATA drives tend to carry.

One drive that stands out this week as a great value is Hitachi's Ultra320 36.7GB 15,000RPM 8MB drive. At under $200, it pretty much embodies the spirit of performance and reliability that SCSI is so well-known for. If choosing SCSI, it's drives like this that make it worth it and will provide a noticeable increase in disk throughput when compared to ATA devices.