Blazing a fiery trail
If you’re running out of hard drive space (and who isn’t), or using a high-end machine that’s begging for a higher sustained transfer rate, you’re in luck. Quantum’s new Fireball TM is a monster of a hard drive. With 3.2GB of data storage capacity, SCSI 3 interface and a seek time of only 10ms, the Fireball TM should satisfy even the most discriminating power user.
We originally tested the Fireball TM on a generic Pentium 166MHz machine equipped with Win95 and Adaptec’s AHA-2940 Ultra Wide PCI SCSI Adapter. Using three test programs: Ziff-Davis’ Disk WinMark 96, SAWs hard disk speed test utility, and Premiere’s hard drive speed test; we achieved an average sustained transfer rate of 702K/sec and an average seek time of 10.3 seconds.
But, since Win95 isn’t really optimized to take advantage of SCSI, we also tested the Fireball NT on Hewlett-Packard’s Vectra XU Pentium Pro 150 running Windows NT 4.0. This time the average sustained transfer rate was 1183K/sec, an increase of almost 500K/sec. Even if your PC is top of the line, bear in mind your choice of OS may determine overall speed and performance.
If you’re doing any intensive transfers, such as video capturing, you’ll definitely want the fastest drive possible. With its roomy 3.2GB of storage and impressive performance, the Fireball TM is perfectly suited for heavy-duty multitasking environments, or applications requiring a higher data throughput.
— Bryan Del Rizzo
