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Quantum Fireball lct10

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PCQ Bureau
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Quantum Fireball lct10



30 GB of storage space at an affordable price and good performance

Quantum Fireball lct10 

30 GB hard drive. Rs 18,000

Features: 5,400 rpm; 512 kB cache buffer; Ultra ATA/66 interface.

Pros: Good overall performance; value for money.

Cons: None.

Source: Ingram Micro India 



#40 Ulsoor Road


Bangalore 560040. 


Tel: 80-5550599/5550605 


Fax: 5586872 


E-mail: rakesh@imindia.com 


Website: www.quantum.com 




Hard drive prices are coming

down like there’s no tomorrow. About two years ago, per GB cost of hard

drives stood greater than a thousand rupees. Today, it stands at between

five to six hundred rupees. Performance and rated specs have also improved.

Most of the drives aimed at the entry-level market today ship with a spindle

speed of 5,400 rpm, a cache of 512 kB, and seek times of less than 10 ms.

The Quantum Fireball is no

different in its specs and pricing. We compared this drive’s performance

against the Seagate U8 drive (reviewed in PC Quest, February 2000, page

151), which is also an entry-level drive with similar specs. The capacity of

the U8, however, was lower at 17.2 GB. The lct10 supports the new ATA/66

interface, which allows burst transfer rates of up to 66 MB/sec.

This hard drive is Quantum’s

latest offering for the low-cost hard drive segment. The lct10 family is

being offered at capacities ranging from 5.1 to 30 GB. We tested the 30 GB

hard drive on a PIII/450 with 128 MB RAM, running Win 98. To test the

overall impact of the drive on the performance of the system, we ran

Business Winstone 99. This benchmark runs office productivity applications

such as Corel WordPerfect, Office 97, and Lotus SmartSuite to come out with

an overall score. The Fireball got a score of 23 against a 22.1 that the U8

had managed. This indicates an improvement of about 4 percent in

productivity applications.

Next,

we ran WinBench 99 to test for the drive’s average seek time, raw

throughputs, and disk CPU utilization. The Fireball scored an average seek

time of 10.2 ms (against its rated 9.5 ms), which is much better than the

13.5 ms (8.9 ms rated) scored by the U8. In raw throughputs, however, the U8

scored better. The overall throughput of the Fireball lct10 tagged at about

22.5 MB/sec, which is a little less than the 23 MB/sec of the U8.

The CPU utilization of both

drives was quite similar too. The Seagate U8 had a usage of 4.07 percent

while the Fireball lct10 showed 3.94 percent. Therefore, we see that there

isn’t much difference between these two drives when it comes to

performance. The U8 that we reviewed was a 17.2 GB drive costing about Rs

535 per GB. The Fireball costs Rs 18,000 for 30 GB, at about Rs 600 per GB.

That’s not a very big price difference per GB for almost double the

capacity.

The drive comes with a

one-year warranty.

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