Storage Forums: Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 - Storage Forums

Corporate purchasers and enthusiasts alike have all breathlessly awaited the next-generation of 15,000 RPM monsters from the likes of Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu, and Hitachi. The first of this highly-anticipated new breed has finally met StorageReview's Testbed3. How does Seagate's Cheetah 15K.4 fare? Join us as we take a look at this 147 GB, 15K RPM contender.

Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 Review

I am disappointed with the 15k.4. The 15k.4 is louder, hotter, and has a reduction in performance when performing in its server duties. I am not inclined to upgrade my 15k.3 to Seagate’s newest offering.

As I said in another post, I intend to purchase the Maxtor Atlas 15k II. I just hope that MaxtorSCSI can facilitate this purchase with a generous rebate or coupon.

Eugene and SR Team,

Thanks for the enjoyable, informative, and timely review of the 15k.4.

Harry

Hmmm... looks like I'll be picking up an Atlas 15K II for my next OS drive and not a 15K.4.

Although in a few months if SR tests another 15K.4 sample and gets better results I will be very interested.

I've always liked Seagate, but this time I was a little disappointed by their new flagship. Previously, Seagate's new 15Ks outperformed older generations by a wide margin, but this one falls a bit short (even underperforming the previous model in some tests!). It's almost like Seagate tried too hard to tweak their firmware for desktop use and forgot about their server base. Even with PM on, I'm not exactly blown away by the results, and it doesn't give me the sense that it's worth the high premium this time. Perhaps a firmware revision will fix that.

As always, thank-you Eugene for another fine review. I'm looking forward to the 15K II and MAU results!

Maxtor's Atlas 15kII has shown some impressive results, but I wonder what "if" Fujitsu releases their monster

The realtime pricing shows a different product, and the different product seems to be overpriced by several orders of magnitude.

I love my 3 Seagate’s 15.3K (ST373453LW) drives, I have the Maxtor 15K, and was also very impresses by Fujitsu’s numbers. I am glad I purchased them when they were at some of the lowest prices to be found; based on the comparison I think the 15.3K drives will go up in price.

With all the technology available to Seagate I am also disappointed at the numbers; only marginal improvements, and now with the high heat dissipation, they should be cooler, or come with a built in fan.

I really think they are putting more R&D on the Serial SCSI (SAS); from all I’ve read, when available, they will blow the doors of any new line of SCSI drives being offered, and will coexist with the SATA drives, and the new SATA II in the horizon.

chipstone, on Nov 16 2004, 08:11 AM, said:

Having a SAS interface should have very little effect on performance. They could plug an ATA interface on the same mechanism included in any SAS drive and it should perform essentially the same. Or perhaps a little worse if some form of Command Queuing wasn't implemented. But the SCSI interface has no performance limiting factors as compared to SAS.

Once SAS is widely available, won't prices of the SCSI drives go up? Or the SCSI controllers for that manner I presume?