Price Guides October 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage

Hard Drives: SCSI

In the land of SCSI, not much has changed over the years. SCSI still provides the best available performance for disk-bound enterprise applications and it still carries with it the price premium that it has carried for its entire existence. But with drives like Seagate's Savvio coming to the market, it is nice to see that there is still room left for innovation and improvement.

This week, Fujitsu's Ultra320 36.7GB 10000RPM 8MB drive comes up as the best value for the lower end of the SCSI selection. Lower end refers only to the capacity and spindle speed when compared to other options that SCSI can offer. This isn't to say that it doesn't continue to out-perform just about any ATA based drive, outside of the Western Digital Raptors.

Unless you are buying parts for some type of server that can really benefit from SCSI under high loads, such as databases or other highly disk intensive applications, 10,000RPMs is usually enough. Additionally, this is only the 36.7GB capacity being referenced. The reason why we chose to point out this particular drive size is that the area of around 40GB seems to be the minimum drive size for most new systems these days. Once you go beyond 36.7GB, however, prices do not scale linearly, which makes SCSI still less attractive than the right ATA solution, when it comes to mass storage that doesn't require heavy traffic.