SCSI and SAS

Moving along to the enterprise sector, we'll take a look at the SCSI and SAS drives we have floating around the marketplace. There are a lot of drives being offered in this lineup, so we know looking through the chart may seem a tad overwhelming. We'd like to remind you to make sure you purchase a drive that meets your system requirements. There are drives with a 68-pin interface along with drives using an 80-pin interface, so it's worth double-checking before you purchase anything.

You also have the option of going with a 10,000 or 15,000RPM hard drive. The 15K RPM drives are rather loud, not to mention being expensive and having relatively limited capacities, which is why most people would much rather stick with slower SATA drives in desktop systems. The 15,000RPM SCSI drives are used almost exclusively in the enterprise sector, which accounts for the extremely high prices. If you're looking for the highest capacity 15,000RPM drive possible, there are quite a few 146/147GB models available, starting at about $800 and going up to over $1000. However, unlike the 10K market, there are no 300GB 15K SCSI drives available just yet.



There are also SAS drives available for the enterprise market, but you will pay a slightly higher premium than you would for the Ultra 320 drives. There are only three manufacturers listed here, but both Maxtor and Hitachi drives have 16MB of cache while Seagate's offerings only have an 8MB cache. This isn't a huge concern, but we feel it still warrants mention.




PATA Optical Storage
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  • Calin - Tuesday, July 18, 2006 - link

    I don't remember seeing small form factor (the laptop type) DVD-RW units - and I don't know if there really is a market for those.
    I wanted to buy a dual layer DVD once - but it was about 20 times more expensive than the cheap single layer DVDR. Since then, the price decreased - but not enough to make them worth buying
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 18, 2006 - link

    Slim DVDR drives top out at 8X I think, but you can get them for around $70 or so last I checked (which was months ago - might be under $50 if you're lucky).
  • segagenesis - Monday, July 17, 2006 - link

    Samsung has a sata-ii capable drive in the 400 gig range cheaper than the others...

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...

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