Introduction

Lately, almost everybody's attention has been turned towards the Pentium 4 at 2.2 GHz, various chipset battles in the motherboard scene and the upcoming release of the GeForce 4 graphics processor, but the hard drive industry has not exactly been asleep, either. We picked up one of the latest Fujitsu drives in order to show you what's going on in this sector. Their enterprise hard drives have improved within the last several months. The latest 'MAN' series has replaced its 'MAJ' predecessor and is facing competition from Maxtor, IBM and Seagate.

Fujitsu's MAN3367MP represents a typical high-performance drive. It is available at 18, 36 or 72 GB (we received the 36 GB version), runs at 10,000 rpm and comes with quick seek times and an 8 MB cache memory for fast performance. Although Ultra320 is on its way, it will take some time until host adapters and drives become affordable, which leaves Ultra160 the only applicable solution for high-end storage solutions now. In addition, you should have 64 bit PCI slots in order to make use of the enhanced SCSI bandwidth.

Recent hard drive tests at Tom's Hardware Guide have reviewed IDE models. We decided to include some of those benchmark results, so that you can compare the performance of IDE drives with SCSI drives, as well.