Price Guides, July 2005: Storage

SCSI

Generally there aren't too many exciting SCSI announcements, but it looks like July will be an exception. Serial Attached SCSI controllers have been around since fall of last year, but it looks like SAS drives are finally ready to show up in the retail channel. You may recall the SCSI Trade Organization's roadmap outlining 3Gb/s SAS drives over a year ago, but as we know in the computer world, paper launches and 6 month delays are all too common. It looks like Maxtor and Seagate will be the first manufacturers to launch into the retail channel with Fujitsu close behind. Realistically expect two to three weeks before they show up in major retail channels. As always, expect more SAS coverage from us as retail drives start to show up.

Searching through our SCSI inventory for SCSI 15000RPM drives [RTPE: ultra320 15000RPM] yields a bunch of hard drives that haven't changed in price since May. Unfortunately, there just aren't any really killer deals around for SCSI hard drives in the 15000RPM range. On the other hand, 10000RPM drives are actually a little more volatile. Prices on Maxtor Atlas IV drives have been below the $3 per GB mark for a few months, but it looks like the Atlas V drives are also about to cross that threshold. Seagate 10K.7 have also made some impressive drops in the last few weeks but SCSI hasn't quite made the leap into a price per GB that can compare to a pair of Raptors. Check out how Seagate's 10K.7 73GB SCSI drive [RTPE: ST373207LC] has fared recently.

Seagate Ultra320 73GB 10000RPM 8MB Cheetah 10K.7 80-pin

Certainly impressive, but it looks like we might have to wait for SAS before we see some really big moves in the SCSI market.