Quantum Fireball Plus AS 30 Gig Hard Drive Review

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:

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

[Page 1] [Page 2] [Page 3] [Page 4] [Page 5] [Page 6] [Home]