Price Guides, August 2005: Storage

SCSI

Apparently we jumped the gun a little bit last week when we claimed SAS drives were ready for the retail channel. SAS, or Serial Attached SCSI, is essentially the SCSI Trade Organization's counter to 3GBps SATA. Just as there is debate as to whether or not 3GBps SATA will provide any benefit over traditional 1.5GBps SATA, there is a bit of an internal struggle in the SCSI Trade Organization as for the direction of SAS too. If anything, SAS is really an alternative to fiber channel rather than a successor of SCSI or SATA. The drives are prohibitively expensive and hardly offer any real features over SCSI U320, so why become an early adopter? Anyways, the tallies are official; Maxtor made it to channel first with SAS, and we don't recommend it. If you really need SAS, you knew five years ago already.

Last month's Price Guide detailed the very few deals in the SCSI market. As we mentioned earlier, as soon as Maxtor began to push the price per GB below that of Western Digital's Raptors, WD released a semi-permanent Mail In Rebate. Obviously there are advantages in favor of SATA or SCSI, but when 10,000RPM SATA and SCSI drives cost the same, the consumer benefits. We featured Seagate's 10K.7 73GB [RTPE: ST373207LC] drive last week, but since then Maxtor's Atlas 10K V [RTPE: 8D073J0] became the most aggressively priced drive on the block; and only at a $20 out-the-door discount over Western Digital's 74GB Raptor. Check out Maxtor's recent price cuts below:

Maxtor Ultra320 73GB 10000RPM 8MB Atlas 10K V 80-pin