Seagate Cheetah 36XL
The Cheetah was the only SCSI drive that we tested. It has an Ultra160 interface which means you can sustain transfer rates of 160 megabits per second. This drive also spins at an incredible 10,000RPM. It has a formatted capacity of 36.7GB and Seagate claims that this drive is 15 percent faster than the previous generation of Cheetah drives. It's a pity we didn't receive any other SCSI drives to put it up against. The transfer graphs looked quite good for the Cheetah drive. The Cheetah sustained some smooth transfers and it even sustained good high transfer rates for the most part of the test.
The Cheetah scored well over what any IDE drive could manage. However, when we look at its overall price and cost per gigabyte its appeal fades. The Cheetah costs $1297, which works out to $35 per GB. There is a definite performance advantage over the IDE drives but where you will really see why a SCSI drive is well worth the money is in an applications server where you need lots of disks. Another advantage is the ability to use RAID 5. You cannot set up RAID 5 with IDE drives.
Company:Seagate Technology
Price:AU$1297.12
Phone:02 8748 2700
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