The birth of a new Cheetah
Or rather fresh out of hospital. Last week I sent my broken Seagate Cheetah 10.7 drive back to Seagate and mentioned how surprised I was to get an email back within a few hours of it being delivered to their UK offices saying my replacement drive has been shipped.
Today that drive arrived by DHL. Seagate's policy is not to replace broken drives with brand new ones (that would be too nice) but instead replace them with ones they have repaired. I don't mind too much as these units will be used in a RAID 5 array or on a workstation where no important data resides. Nevertheless the turnaround was quick and I'm a happy chappie.
Yesterday I took delivery of three Fujitsu 10,000 RPM drives from the MAP series (Fujitsu used to use the MA<letter> terminology, so the last 10,000 RPM SCSI drives from them were the MAW units). These drives are brand new but they were made about five years ago, and judging by the noise they make (compared to the MAW drives in my workstation) they don't use fluid dynamic bearings inside. Nevertheless for a server (which is what I am going to use these on), the MAP drives are perfect - 280GB of RAID 5 goodness!
Also a final note, Intel's X25 SSD units are coming down and are currently at the £300 inc VAT for the X25-M 80GB model. Once these units go below £200 there will be very few reasons not to use these drives in your workstation alongside a traditional hard drive for all your dodgy stuff.