Seagate Cheetah 10K.6

Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 Capacities Model Number Capacity ST336607LW/LC 36 GB ST373307LW/LC 73 GB ST3146807LW/LC 146 GB Lowest Real-Time Price: Introduction With the continued maturation of 15,000 RPM drives from Seagate and Fujitsu as well as Maxtor's upcoming introduction of the Atlas 15K, 10,000 RPM SCSI drives have become decidedly mainstream, perhaps even "boring." Even so, with the demise of 7200 RPM units, 10K drives are now the class of choice when it comes to enterprise-level applications that emphasize capacity needs over raw speed.

Introduced in 1996, Seagate's venerable 10K RPM line is now in its sixth generation. Featuring up to four platters that pack 36 gigabytes of data each, the flagship Cheetah 10K.6 can store 146 gigabytes of data in a low-profile form factor. The drive features Seagate's most ambitious claimed average seek time yet at just 4.7 milliseconds. Buffer has been doubled up to 8 megabytes… a no brainer when high-performance ATA drives are now standardizing on the same size!

The 10K.6 is the second Ultra320 SCSI drive to hit our testbed. Ultra320's most highly-touted feature, of course, is an increase in the throughput ceiling to 320 MB/sec. Keep in mind that the current transfer rate champion, Seagate's own Cheetah 15K.3, pushes 76 MB/sec in its outer sectors. While figures like these threaten Ultra2 SCSI's 80 MB/sec barrier, Ultra160's 160 MB/sec limit maintains plenty of headroom. It is only in multi-drive scenarios that 160 MB/sec bottlenecks arise. Our base drive tests occur with a single unit as the only active device on the host adapter. In such a setup, any performance advantages that Ultra320 (along with the requisite higher-bandwidth 64-bit PCI slots) would deliver over 160 are negligible. For our performance tests, we're going to take advantage of the specification's backwards compatibility and run the drive in Ultra160 mode off of our current host adapter. Bear in mind that improved bandwidth is only one of the benefits that Ultra320 delivers. A host of improvements in protocol and error correction should elevate data integrity and device interoperability to new levels.

Interestingly, Seagate chose to stick with traditional ball-bearing motors in the 10K.6 rather than introducing the fluid dynamic bearing motors that hit the 15K series with last year's X15-36LP. Why? There's really no concrete answer aside from the general impression that the 15K series incorporates all of the latest and greatest technologies while the 10K line retains the tried and true.

What new heights does Seagate's latest scale? Let's take a look!