SERVERS & PERIPHERALS Primary Storage Subsystem: Cheetah 4LP P rimary storage vendors--especially those working on magnetic disk technology--have achieved great advances this year. While hard-drive capacity and performance have grown by leaps and bounds, prices have shrunk drastically. And just when everyone thought there was nowhere else to go--no higher speeds or greater capacities to be achieved--Seagate Technology's Cheetah disk drive hit the ground running and left its competitors in the dust. The Cheetah 4LP 3.5-inch magnetic disk drive is the first to sustain 10,000 RPM performance with equally high reliability. The Cheetah also offers unsurpassed transfer speeds of up to 15 MB per second, making it a n excellent choice for server-based primary storage and RAID applications for your enterprise network. Put all of those features together and you get Cheetah--this year's Well-Connected winner. The Cheetah takes advantage of state-of-the-art UltraSCSI architecture as well as Fibre Channel for a high-speed interface with its host. Its advanced hardware makes it possible for it to surpass past seek times to reach as much as 7.5 milliseconds (ms) on average. Additionally, its embedded servo mechanisms make it ideal for smooth delivery of data required by multimedia applications. Cheetah 4LP , price not yet available, Seagate Technology, (800) SEAGATE, www.seagate.com Honorable Mentions: RAIDstack , $5,300 to $25,400, AIWA America, (800) 920-2673, www.aiwa.com Quantum Atlas II , $1,159 (4 GB); $1,999 (9 GB), Quantum Corp., (800) 624-5545, www.quantum.c om Awards Table of Contents

Updated April 24, 1997