Quantum Fireball lct10

Quantum Fireball lct10

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

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.