Hitachi 300 GB SAS - vs. Seagate free download

File name 300 GB SAS - Hitachi vs. Seagate.PDF

Boot Daily - Boot-up your tech! 300GB SAS Face Off - Hitachi Vs. Seagate Contributed by Duane Pemberton Tuesday, 08 January 2008 Last Updated Friday, 25 January 2008 In the IT world of high-speed, redundant data systems, performance is always paramount as is reliability. Companies don’t want to waste time and money with drives which are sub-standard in either category. Two of the market leaders right now are Seagate and Hitachi with the largest share of the market belonging to Seagate. Many of you already know that even before Hitachi acquired IBM’s hard drive division a few years ago, it had been producing hard drives for the enterprise market for a long time. Serial Attached SCSI is quickly taking over the entire IT market; replacing the older UltraSCSI 320 as the interface to have. It supplies more bandwidth with all the benefits of a SCSI interface and uses a much smaller cable. This technology combines the best of using SCSI commands and the high bandwidth of serial communication. The end result is the fastest interface currently available. It’s no wonder why the IT industry is so quickly adopting it in favor of the older SCSI technology and the two companies represented in this review are primed to help facilitate its needs in the future. Seagate’s Cheetah line has a legacy of being amongst the fastest available and some of the most reliable. Its 15k 300GB drive is the fastest-spinning, largest capacity unit Seagate currently offers, however, there is a 450GB model coming out later this quarter. Four 75 Gigabyte platters are used which means the areal density isn’t near as high as we find on the desktop markets but the overall rotational speed more than makes up any slack. Sixteen megabytes of cache is mated to the drive as is the now-typical features such as a fluid bearing motor assembly and a 5-year warranty. A couple of Seagate exclusives worth pointing out here is its IRAW (Idle Read After Write) which helps keep data safe thru a verification process during drive idle time. It makes sure that anything sitting in the buffer was properly written. Secondly is a BMS (Background Media Scan) function which will scan the drive during idle time for potential defects to help curb any errors before data loss occurs. Priced from about $500-$600 dollars is about on-par with the enterprise market for a drive of this caliber and there seems to be ample supply of them in the channel. Costs for these kinds of drives is always higher per capacity than desktop variants because the majority of R&D from Seagate goes into making them the best performing and longest-lasting drives possible. http://www.bootdaily.com Powered by Joomla! Generated: 21 September, 2008, 22:27 Boot Daily - Boot-up your tech! {mospagebreak_scroll title=Hitachi 15k300} Power for a full load hovers near 18wa