I tested the Quantum Fireball in a Celeron 366 system overclocked to 567Mhz. The motherboard I used is Abit's excellent BE6. The Abit motherboard has built-in support for ATA/66.  The other equipment in the system includes a Viper 770 Ultra, Diamond  MX300 sound card, 128 Megs of PC-133 SDRAM, 100 Base NIC, etc..

Installation was like any other hard drive, which is to say easy. You do have to make sure you plug in the ATA/66 cable the correct way (Blue connector to the controller, Black bit to the hard drive). If you get the cable backwards, it doesn't work correctly. First thing we notice is that the hard drive doesn't show up in the Abit's BIOS when you go to detect it. This is because the Abit's ATA/66 controller is actually and external one.

To test the Quantum drive, I ran SiSoft SANDRA. This software can test a lot more than just your hard drive. As a matter of fact, it can benchmark pretty much anything in your system. Here is the hard drive score.

As you see, the score is pretty kick ass. Just for comparison, I ran the same test on a 10.2 Fujitsu 5400 RPM IDE drive. Here's the SANDRA score for that:

Under real world gaming situations, the drive performs great.  I was always among the first to get onto each Quake 3 level.  I also notice a nice speed increase from Unreal Tournament.  With my old drive, which only spun at 4,500 RPM, Unreal Tournament was very choppy. The choppiness disappeared with the Quantum drive.

Great performance, great price, good warranty and lots of storage space. There's isn't much missing from drive. The icing on the cake is the Quantum KA is very quiet for a 7,200 RPM hard drive. With a street price of about $180, I can't see how you can lose going with the Quantum 18 Gig KA.

The Goods

• Great performance
• Great Price
• Very quiet
• Easy to install

The Bads

• Nada