Fujitsu is a company who’s drives haven’t received very many looks at the Storage Review. We’ve only taken a brief look at an ATA model, the MPB3064AT. Fujitsu has offered SCSI drives for some time now, and is in fact planning to ship a 10,000rpm drive, the MAC3xxx series. Here we’ll take a look at an inexpensive Fujitsu SCSI offering that’s widely available: the MAB3091SP.

The MAB3091SP is a low-profile (one inch high) 9.1GB Ultra Wide SCSI drive. It features the normal 1.8 gigs on 5 separate platters, a 7200rpm spindle speed, 7.5 millisecond access time, and a 512k buffer. Fujitsu warrants the drive for five years. Documentation was pretty standard SCSI-fare, a single sheet outlining termination and ID settings. Installation was straight-forward; read and write-caching were both enabled out of the box.

ZDBop's Winbench 98 along with Adaptec's Threadmark 2.0 were both run on the unit in Windows 95 OSR 2.1 and Windows NT Workstation 4.0. The drive was partitioned into a single volume of maximum size. The average of 5 trials is presented below.

The MAB3091SP’s performance lagged behind that of similar priced drives, including IBM’s Ultrastar 9ES and especially the Quantum Viking II. Compared to the Viking, the Fuji lagged 2-9% in ZD’s WinMarks scores and 13-15% in Adaptec’s ThreadMark.

Fuji’s drive, simply stated, is the quietest SCSI drive I’ve tested to date. There’s no high-pitch whine, and both idle and seek noise was below that of the impressively-silent IBM Ultrastar 9ES. Operating in a drive cooler, the drive ran very cool- it probably didn’t need the extra ventilation.

The Fujitsu MAB3091SP (am I the only one who thinks Fuji needs to come up with a catchy name for their drive lines??) provides an option for those who must go with SCSI yet demand the utmost in silent operation. The drives performance, though not stellar, is still adequate. One probably wouldn’t notice the gaps posted between the Viking II and the Fuji. I admit I’m still partial to the Quantum, but low operational-noise makes the MAB3091SP the right drive for some.