Seagate Cheetah 36XL

The Cheetah 36XL is the latest 10,000 rpm SCSI hard drive from Seagate. Unlike normal desktop IDE drives that are either 5,400 or

7,200 rpm, SCSI drives have a faster, spindle speed, which makes the platters spin much faster thereby improving transfer rates. A downside to this is that faster rpm speeds cause drives to heat up, and the 36XL is no exception. So make sure your computer’s cabinet is well ventilated if you buy this hard drive. The drive has a built-in temperature sensor that can warn the host in case of high temperature. Higher rpm also improves the access time, or the time the drive takes to actually read data from a specific location on a platter from the time of giving the instruction for doing so. The 36XL has a rated average access time of 5.6 ms. We put the drive through several tests to check out its features. Here are our findings.

For testing the drive, we used a PIII/800 MHz with 128 MB RAM, an ASUS V770 display card with 32 MB VRAM, and an Adaptec AHA-2940U2W SCSI card. We tested it both in Windows NT and 2000. We first ran High End Winstone 99, which runs a set of high-end applications like Adobe Photoshop and Visual C++ and gives an overall score. The drive got a score of 42.1 in Win NT and a similar score of 42.4 under Windows 2000, which is pretty good. To test the raw transfer rates and access time of the drive, we ran the Disk Inspection tests in Winbench 99.

The drive tagged an overall data transfer rate of 37.3 MB/sec in both Win NT and 2000, which is excellent compared to some of the SCSI drives we’ve reviewed. The Cheetah XL (10,000 rpm), for instance, had managed 35.5 MB/sec. Even more interestingly, the Cheetah X15, which was a 15,000 rpm drive, got 36.9 MB/sec, which is slightly lower than this drive. 

So as far as raw transfer rates go, this drive is one of the best. It also managed to get an average access time of 5.72 ms under Windows 2000, which is very close to its rated time of 5.6 ms. 

Another feature of this drive is that it includes an ample 4 MB cache buffer, which adds to the performance. The drive is supposed to handle operating shocks of up to 15 Gs and non-operating shocks of up to 125 Gs for a maximum duration of 11 ms, which is pretty good compared to some other drive specifications we checked up. The IBM UltraStar 36LZX, for example, can handle a shock of 10 Gs (operating) and 75 Gs (non-operating) for 11 ms. 

Overall a drive with great performance, for applications that need high transfer speeds, like CAD/CAM applications.

Sachin Makhija and Sanjay Majumder at PCQ Labs