Seagate Cheetah 140 GB

This high performance 15,000 rpm Hard Disk Drive from Seagate is meant for the high-end servers, NAS, SAN and other mission-critical server-storage solutions. It has a SCSI Ultra320 Wide interface and needs separate data and power connections. The drive comes with an onboard buffer of 8 MB and takes on average of about 20 secs to spin up. 

The drive does heat up a bit during operations and it would be wise to have a good cooling solution. The hard disk resembles the Seagate Cheetah ST336753LW disk (we used that in our August 2003 shootout, page 78). 

We tested the disk on a dual processor IBM eServer. One big disadvantage is that during I/O, the disk uses 94% CPU power. We ran the HEW (High End

Winmark) and the BDW (Business Disk Winmark) tests and got scores of 23,300 bytes per sec and 9,510 bytes per sec, respectively. Average disk access time stood at 5.8 ms. Disk transfer rates topped out at a whopping 37,800 bytes per sec.

The Bottom Line: Per MB cost works out to roughly Rs 450 per GB. But for such a hard disk, this is perfectly worth it. 

Sujay V Sarma