The Atlas 10K family of hard drives is Quantum’s SCSI solution for high-end enterprise servers. It’s aimed at applications such as online transaction processing
(OLTP), ISP installations, 3D image rendering, and broadcast video systems. The 10K is available in three capacities: 9.1,18.2,
and 36.4 GB. We reviewed the 18.2 GB drive.
The drive spins at 10,000 rpm–the fastest rates today. It’s one of the first drives to support the new Ultra 160/m SCSI interface, which gives double the maximum throughput of the previous Ultra2 Wide standard. You can see the advantage of this interface when you connect multiple drives to the same SCSI controller. For example, you can have 14 Atlas 10K’s connected to a single Ultra 160/m controller, and they’ll all share the same bandwidth of 160 Mbps. What’s more, the drive has an average seek time of 5 ms and a large 2 MB-cache buffer.
Quantum Atlas 10K |
18.2 GB SCSI hard drive. Rs 40,000 Features: 10,000 rpm; 2 MB cache buffer; supports the new Ultra 160/m SCSI interface. Pros: Low CPU utilization; low seek time; high transfer rates. Cons: None. Source: Ingram Micro India |
To test the business as well as high-end disk performance of the drive, we used Ziff Davis’s Winbench 99 suite. The test machine was a
PIII/450 with 128 MB RAM and an Intel 740 display adapter on an Intel 443BX motherboard. We used Adaptec’s latest AHA-2940U2W SCSI controller card, which supports the new Ultra 160/m SCSI interface. We ran the same set of tests under Win 98 running on FAT16 and Win NT running on NTFS with SP3.
We checked for raw transfer rates as well as those produced by various high-end applications. The results were quite impressive. The drive gave a low seek time of 5.7 ms, which was a hairbreadth more than its rated 5 ms. It didn’t put too much load on the CPU either, keeping its utilization to a mere 1.4 percent. In the check for raw transfer speeds (disk transfer rate tests), we noticed that it could really sustain the same rate. So, the overall throughput of the drive tagged at 25 Mbps. We then checked the drive for throughputs while running real-world graphics applications. The overall score there stood at an impressive high of 18 Mbps. The drive also has a five-year warranty.
Overall, there are two factors that make this drive a great buy. The first is the blazingly high transfer rates, and the second is its ability to sustain them. But this performance comes at a fairly high price, and you’ll have to get the right SCSI card to support it. So, if you’re looking for an extremely fast hard drive, look no further.
The Results | ||
Win NT | Win 98 | |
Winbench 99/Disk access time (ms) |
5.66 | 5.75 |
Winbench 99/Disk CPU utilization (percent used) | 1.44 | 3.94 |
Throughput tests (kB/sec) | ||
Winbench 99/Disk playback/HE: AVS/Express 3.4 | 24,100 | 12,400 |
Winbench 99/Disk playback/HE: FrontPage 98 | 49,400 | 58,300 |
Winbench 99/Disk playback/HE: MicroStation SE | 20,800 | 15,100 |
Winbench 99/Disk playback/HE: Photoshop 4 | 8,780 | 11,000 |
Winbench 99/Disk playback/HE: Premiere 4.2 | 21,600 | 17,900 |
Winbench 99/Disk playback/HE: Sound Forge 4 | 33,200 | 44,500 |
Winbench 99/Disk playback/HE: Visual C++ 5 | 18,700 | 19,600 |
Winbench 99/Disk playback/HE: Overall | 19,800 | 18,200 |
Winbench 99/Disk transfer rate: Beginning | 25,800 | 25,800 |
Winbench 99/Disk transfer rate: End | 25,800 | 25,800 |