Fujitsu MAP3147

Fujitsu MAP3147 Capacities Model Number Capacity MAP3367 36 GB MAP3735 73 GB MAP3147 146 GB Lowest Real-Time Price: Introduction Over the past few years, StorageReview.com readers have eagerly anticipated the latest and greatest enterprise-class models from Seagate, IBM, and Maxtor/Quantum. Drive's from Japan's largest manufacturer, Fujitsu, failed to capture the same excitement. Why? Perhaps spottier distribution bears a large part of the blame. Or maybe it has something to do with the line's traditionally pedestrian desktop performance (despite excellent server speed figures).

Whatever the case, we've witnessed relatively little buzz about Fujitsu's MAP3147. Like Seagate's Cheetah 10K.6, the MAP combines up to four 36-gigabyte platters to yield a flagship capacity of 147 GB in a low-profile chassis. Fujitsu specifies the drive's seek time at a speedy 4.5 milliseconds. An eight-megabyte buffer rounds out the vital specs.

In an interesting move, Fujitsu has deployed fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) motors in the family's 147 GB flagship but sticks with traditional ball-bearing motors in the smaller members. This may result in the higher platter-count drive featuring an idle noise floor lower than that of the other models.

There's been some buzz both here at SR as well as on other sites about a defective third-party chip on Fujitsu PCBs that supposedly moved the company to issue a recall. The problem only afflicts the firm's ATA models; SCSI units are unaffected. Fujitsu (coincidentally?) withdrew from the ruthless ATA market some time ago with the 20 GB/platter MPG series as the manufacturer's final release. The MAP line is backed by an enterprise-standard 5-year warranty.

The MAP is one of the first Ultra320 SCSI drives to hit our testbed. Ultra320's most highly-touted feature is, of course, an increase in the throughput ceiling to 320 MB/sec. Keep in mind that the current transfer rate champion, Seagate's 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.