CONCLUSION

   It's been a while since i had an 15k RPM drive in my hands and so i didn't really expect the level of performance the MK3001GRRB managed to achieve which literally left the competition far behind. With this kind of performance i think that 3.5" drives will become obsolete before too long but the main question is how will 2.5" mechanical drives compete with the better all-around performing 2.5" solid state drives in the future. Right now there are two things that make 2.5" mechanical drives more appealing to enterprise users and professionals, first the fact that there aren't any cost-effective SAS SSD models in the market currently and also the data recovery issue SSDs have since if one fails completely there's little to no chance of you ever recovering your data. These two reasons are mainly behind why even now with all the recent SSD price drops most professionals and enterprise users still choose mechanical drives over them for their mission critical operations (sensitive/important data).

   Mid/high end SAS cards don't really come cheap and the same applies for mid/high-end SAS drives even more so when we are talking about 2.5" ones which due to their small size factor are even more expensive than their 3.5" brothers. So currently the MK3001GRRB 300GB SAS 6Gb/s HDD by Toshiba retails for USD389 inside the USA (Purchase Directly from Amazon.com) and for 337Euros inside the EU (Purchase Directly from Amazon.de). Right now the MK3001GRRB is the fastest mechanical drive we've ever used and although the price is set somewhat high for its capacity if you are looking for performance and you are not willing to sacrifice reliability then you can't really do any better and that's why it walks away holding our Platinum award.

PROS

- Build Quality (Enterprise Grade/1.600.000 Hours MTBF)
- Superior Performance (SAS Connectivity/15.000RPM)
- Size Factor (2.5")
- Temperatures
- Environmental Friendly (4.5W Idle Consumption)
- 5 Years Warranty 

CONS

- Price (For Some)