While the 7200rpm rotational speed, 2
megabyte buffer, and 8.5ms seek times are standard fare (indeed nearly Identical
to the specs of my test bed systems drive, a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 13.6G UDMA66
drive) at least on spec’s sheets, the drive’s 20GB per platter places it at the
top of the pack, along with Western Digital’s 200-400BB series drives, in areal
density. Our test model’s hydrodynamic bearing motor (where rather than
bearings, a viscous fluid is used, decreasing noise, and increasing reliability)
is also an uncommon feature, resulting in the extremely low noise levels that
the drive emits, and hopefully increasing the overall longevity of the
mechanism. Only the 1 and 2 platter models (10-40GB sizes) currently offer this
drive motor. Anecdotal comparisons to the Maxtor and IBM drives here in house,
confirm that this is one quiet drive.
Past Quantum Fireball series drives have
seemed to share constructions specs with their higher performance SCSI brethren,
the Atlas series. The new Quantum Fireball Plus AS drives however have been
designed solely as IDE drive unit’s from the ground up. How well they have
leveraged the ATA/100 interface, as well as their highest class areal density,
and turn it into good performance is what we’ll see next. Let’s take a look at
some benchmark tests.
The test platform is my venerable Asus
CUSL2 mainboard, fitted with a P3-700 running at 143FSB for 1001 luvin Mhz. IDE
interface is courtesy of the ICH2 controller in the Intel i815 chipset, and is
rated for ATA/100 transfers. For the purpose of the review I was able to obtain
a total of 4 drives to test for the Sisoft Sandra benchmarks.
The four drives tested are:
-
Maxtor DiamondMax 6800 13.6GB
ATA/66, 9ms, 7200rpm, 2meg buffer
-
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 15GB
ATA/100, 8.5ms, 7200rpm, 2meg buffer
-
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 40GB ATA/100, 8.7ms 7200rpm, 2meg
buffer
-
Quantum Fireball Plus AS 30GB
ATA/100, 9ms, 7200rpm, 2meg buffer
See a pattern here? Very similar paper
specs. So when I fire up Sisoft Sandra’s Disk Benchmark under WinME, you’d think
things would be rather linear…WRONG…Take a look at the next page.
Next page: The benchmarks
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