From a performance standpoint, the professional hard drives clearly outperform everything in the desktop and consumer space. The maximum transfer rates are between 90 and 128 MB/s; access times are in the range of 5.5 and 6.5 ms.

The category of 10,000 RPM 3.5" professional SAS/SCSI hard drives will be phased out during the next few years, as they cannot compete with the high capacities of top-end Serial ATA drives any more. At the same time, the 3.5" 10k SCSI/SAS drives cannot outperform the 2.5" professional drives, nor their 3.5" 15,000 RPM counterparts. The performance future clearly belongs to high-density 2.5" SAS storage arrays for highest I/O scores, and 3.5" 15,000 RPM setups for maximum data transfer rates. The high-capacity space will be dominated by modified SATA drives, which offer unmatched cost per capacity ratios. The cost savings even allow administrators to deploy setups with multiple redundancy. All professional products, whether host adapters or hard drives, come with a manufacturer warranty of five years.

The clear performance winner is Seagate's new Cheetah 15K.5 at 300 GB. With a 128 MB/s maximum transfer speed and an amazing minimum transfer rate of 73 MB/s, it is the fastest hard drive ever. But the drive suffers from relatively long access times of 6.6 ms. For I/O-intensive applications, the 2.5" Savvio 15K.1, also by Seagate, is a much better choice. We measured a 5.5 ms average access time, while its transfer rates of up to 104 MB/s are not bad either, which is the second best result after the Cheetah 15K.5.

Comparison Table

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