|
8/27/00
- By Dave
"Davo" Altavilla
 |
| HotHardware's
Test System |
| Our
test bed |
|
Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 933EB,
Abit SE6 i815 Motherboard, 128MB Corsair PC133
CAS2 SDRAM, Quantum Atlas V 18G and Atlas 10K
II 36G Ultra160 SCSI Hard Drives, Adaptec
29160 Ultra160 64 bit PCI SCSI Card (supplied
by Outside
Loop Computers ), NVidia GeForce2 Ultra,
Pioneer 10X DVD/40X CD ROM, Win 98SE, DirectX
7.0a
 |
| Installation
and Setup on the Atlas 10K II |
| Ultra160
SCSI couldn't be easier |
|
There
really isn't all that much to discuss when it
comes to installing a SCSI drive these
days. We used the
Adaptec 29160 Ultra160 SCSI card as we did in
the Atlas V review. The drive was
partitioned and formatted with Win98SE and we
set it up as a blank test drive in our system
booting off of a separate drive in an effort to
isolate the drive from system overhead during
testing and benchmarks. In the event
you were wondering what the whole set up looks
like, here is a shot of the system.
We
need some tidying up!
Click image for view of Ultra160 Cable, Drives
and Adapter Card
OK,
settle down you hard core Neat Freaks out
there. We realize this case needs a
serious cable reorganization. What we wanted to
show you was the Ultra160 SCSI cabling, the back
side of the drives and the top of the Adaptec
Ultra160 card. This is basically the
physical representation of our set up. The
software drivers for the Adaptec card did the
rest of the work. Even though Ultra160
SCSI is a High End Drive Subsystem, life was
pretty easy going during installation.
 |
| Benchmarks
With The Atlas 10K II |
| New
levels of performance were
achieved |
|
In
our first round of testing we used SiSoft's
Sandra Drive Benchmark to get a baseline on
this drive's I/O performance. Here are the
results.
SiSoft
Sandra Hard Drive Benchmark
We
have seen some RAID O Array performance numbers
that were higher than this but this is by far
the fastest single headed drive performance we
have seen to date in the Sandra Test. Here
Sandra reports the drive's seek time at the
advertised 5ms ( ok 4.7 was specified, close
enough) and Sequential Read and Write Bandwidth
right around the high end of the spec 40MB/sec.
This
is a real good showing for first pass numbers
but let's dig a little deeper. |
