Seagate Cheetah 10k.6 Review
Reviewed by Andrew Chalfant on 05.20.2003
Provided by Seagate

Concluding remarks, final thoughts, and overall product rating:

Before going on to ruminate on the benefits of SCSI versus ATA and sATA, the issue of heat should be brought up. Heat was a complete non-issue with the Cheetah 10k.6 drive - the Maxtor drives in my PC run hotter than this monster of a server drive. It was merely tepid to the touch, which is a large benefit for rackmount servers that run large arrays of drives in environments that do not necessarily give ample airflow - the impact is less overall heat which will help improve drive life, which means more reliability and less downtime for mission-critical servers.
 

The benefits of SCSI over ATA and sATA are huge. First, the performance benefit is not even a question. U320 SCSI destroys ATA/133; and therefore also presumably sATA, as the sATA drive tested earlier this year was on par with the other IDE drives that were tested. Second, SCSI is much more reliable than IDE. IDE may be cheaper, but reading and writing data to an IDE drive 24/7 is abusive and will almost always result in drive failure after probably only a year or two. While building an IDE RAID server may be cheaper initially, the replacement drives and down time that will result from drive failure, formats, and server backups will cost more in the long run. Essentially, the question becomes how cheap is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) behind running a server that needs high-end capabilities: SCSI is a more cost-effective solution for high-end servers not only because of it's performance, but also because of its reliability - SCSI drives will not experience the kind of failure that IDE drives are prone to because SCSI is engineered to run all the time - the mean time between failures on this model is about 1.2 million hours of straight operating time.

"Okay, so SCSI is great, but why the Cheetah 10k.6 over other drives?" is a question that many readers may be asking. The answer is that the Cheetah 10k.6 drive is one of the highest capacity U320 SCSI drives available. This means that there are fewer drives in a rack-mount, which means less heat, fewer variables, and greater storage capacity. The benefit is more time between upgrades and a lower chance of drive failure, which lowers the TCO dramatically. For anyone looking to build a server that requires extended up-time, using the Cheetah 10k.6 drives will not only be cheaper in the long run (currently about $800~900 a drive on pricewatch), but the server will perform better as well.

The Cheetah 10k.6 drive impressed the staff here at Techware Labs so much that it receives a perfect score: 10/10

The drive is reliable, performs amazingly, has incredibly high capacity, and is fairly inexpensive as far as SCSI drives in its class go.