Price Guides November 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage
by Adam Rader on November 6, 2004 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Hard Drives: SCSI
SCSI continues to be the technology of choice for high-end workstations and servers, but also continues to be among the pricier of storage options currently available. If you can find a good deal or sale, then it's definitely possible to walk away with a very high-end drive for relatively little money, but the chances of a 15,000RPM monster falling from the sky are rather slim, which is why if you're thinking of SCSI, you need to keep a close eye on your budget.Most home users and even enthusiasts would not see much in the way of tangible benefits for the investment in SCSI, especially when cost per gigabyte comes into play. Even so, there are still many cases where SCSI is the superior design, and for those cases, Maxtor's Ultra320 36.7GB 10000RPM 8MB drive is a very good choice, priced only about $20 more than the same size Raptor from Western Digital. In this case, and others like it, the choice really comes down to whether or not you have a SCSI controller already. If you do, then the Maxtor is far from being a bad choice, since it has the performance that you want along with reliability, which can be deduced from the attached five-year warranty.
As you can see, SCSI isn't the kind of technology to have rapidly fluctuating prices, so unlike SATA and PATA, there's no real benefit to the old, wait-and-see method of getting better prices.
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bofkentucky - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link
I was pointing out an obvious error in the price guide, not commenting on your high performance SATA rant. And kogase is right, everyone else has a lucrative SCSI market to protect. WD needs a more dense solution tough, 74GB is getting tight in an age of HomePVR's and HD Video.Gnoad - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link
and that would be a scsi drive, which doesn't interest the normal consumer too much. I was talking about sata drives.bofkentucky - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link
Seagate Ultra320 146GB 10000RPM 8MB for 159.99I don't think so
Live - Sunday, November 7, 2004 - link
The Samsung drive exists in 2 versions one with a very good motor with low noise and heat as a result. But lately the have started to use a different and louder motor on at least some of there drives. They are named the same so no way telling the differences by the name of the drive you have to check the actual printing on the drive.mongoosesRawesome - Sunday, November 7, 2004 - link
No mention of the fact that SATA drives can limit your OC. That would be my main reason to stay with PATA. I wouldn't mind seeing this phenomenon investigated in an article...drifter106 - Sunday, November 7, 2004 - link
kogase - Saturday, November 6, 2004 - link
I think it has something to do with the fact that those companies have high performance SCSI lines, and don't want to throw away their investment in that field with a similar performing SATA drive.Gnoad - Saturday, November 6, 2004 - link
Very good article. It seems nobody is really trying to compete with the Raptor drives. Maxtor tried with 16mb cache, but what we really need is more 10k drives. I figured we would be seeing other drives like the raptors within months after they were released. Why aren't seagate, maxtor, samsung going with 10k drives? Are they just giving the high end market to WD?