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Two factors make a reliable, speedy hard drive a necessity. One is the increased size of almost all programs, but especially multimedia…and business is quickly embracing streaming video, sounds, etc. for training, servers, sales tools and a variety of as sociated applications. Second, even using the PCI bus, actual transfer of data still hits a bottleneck. This brings me to the reason why only one drive is reviewed. Actually, although this is a review, it should serve more as an example of a higher end, higher quality hard drive to solve specific needs. It is a SCSI-3 (sometimes referred to as an “ultra-wide” drive) which allows up to 40 megabytes per second transfer of data…compared to a typical IDE system’s transfer of about ten megabytes. Editor
Initially it was a toss-up between Quantum’s powerful Atlas II, 4.55 gigabyte SCSI-3 drive and another drive. The specs for the Atlas were better and my experience with Quantum products has always been very good. Why such a drive? I travel a lot. I have a small business, lots of information and data and a need to prepare multimedia presentations. Therefore, I looked for storage capacity, reliability, and a drive capable of getting data from one place to another quickly. The Atlas II has been out over a year in this 3.5” form size and runs at 7,200 rpm. (Note: it runs very warm - to the touch. I was assured by Tech Support this was normal and with adequate ventilation the drive would have no problem. It was designed to run hot!) Another reason that it i s speedy is it features a very large cache: 512K on the drive. For instance, you can readily tell the difference between this drive and the other one on my system when you retrieve a graphic or larger text file. There is a quick, short movement of the dr ive and there it is on the screen. With about an eight-second seek time, I don’t worry about working with large files anymore, especially in a multi-tasking environment.
For you techies: one of the reasons the Atlas can pack so much storage into a small space is their use of the advanced “MR” (magneto resistive read/write heads) that allow so much more data per square centimeter of disk space. To save space and increase performance, Quantum has included in its advanced drive series a new SCSI controller that features command executions on the hard drive, rather than further down the transfer line of data. This saves time in executing commands that you send to the hard d rive.
A non-technical “feature” not common to most hard drives is how quietly the Atlas II operates. Except for a few seconds during the SCSI BIOS interrogation, there was no noticeable sound from this drive. In an office environment, I think this should be a consideration.
What’s not so good? Actually, the only thing I found not so helpful was the documentation. SCSI these days is a lot simpler to set up than just a few years ago…provided you set the various jumpers correctly. It can be done and done easily. However, the S CSI ID chart was not properly laid out and I kept setting the jumpers incorrectly. After several calls to Tech Support, they faxed a corrected chart, hand annotated for my particular situation. I give Quantum’s Tech Support a real thumbs up. I had other problems not related to the drive. The Tech Support folks were very helpful, patient, and it didn’t seem to matter if it was the drive or something else. Their interest was in getting the drive up and working. Such quality is not often seen today.
I ran the WinBench 97® tests and results are very impressive. (Please see chart.) The street price is about $845. I would recommend this drive to any serious computer user - stand alone or server. It is an exceptional performer.
Richard Serbin is a HAL-PC member and president of Texas Commercial Brokers, Inc.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.
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Last modified: 1997:08:31