The Need For Speed: SCSI Drives With 15,000 RPM

We published our comparison of the "upper mid-range" - SCSI hard drives with 10,000 rpm a few weeks ago. We haven't been idle, though, and have this time devoted ourselves to the elite class of hard drives. All four manufacturers in this segment - Fujitsu, Hitachi, Maxtor and Seagate - offer corresponding products with capacities of 18, 36 or 73 GB. Time for a trial of strength.

In contrast to the desktop segment, the race for the highest capacities per platter is largely irrelevant in the high-end segment. Indeed, the most available capacity per drive in all four makes was just 74 GB. For the Fujitsu, Maxtor und Seagate models, this was comprised of four platters of approx. 18 GB each; Hitachi uses five magnetic disks each holding around 15 GB.

What's interesting about this drive category is maximum performance coupled with high investment security. But this does not mean that the drives cost less. Far from it: a 15,000 rpm, 73 GB hard drive can cost as much as a complete PC system. What's important here is smooth use and high reliability over a longer time. To wrap up, we'll discuss the most demanding applications, such as databases in high-availability systems.