Two years ago, I knew that something was up when I saw a 5,400RPM
Western Digital 10GB hard drive load stuff faster than my 7,200RPM IBM
Deskstar 12.9GB drive. I was embarassed by it, especially when I saw
the file copy portion of Windows 95 OSR2 setup take one minute on a
Pentium MMX/233. I thought previously that only SCSI RAID 0/5 setups
could outperform my drive.
Times have changed.
On March 1st, 2002, the biggest performance increase for my Athlon would be
realized. No, it's not the 10GB Western Digital drive. It's something more
modern, faster, and more spacious than that.
It's Maxtor's flagship IDE series of hard drives, the DiamondMax Plus D740X.
I've got the 40GB model. Specs are below:
Single platter 40GB hard drive
7,200 RPM spindle speed
8.0ms seek time
2MB buffer
Supports Ultra DMA/133
40 Gigabytes on one platter is definitely an impressive feat. More data on
less platters allows for faster, smaller drives.
So far, I've been very impressed with the performance numbers of this drive.
That could be part of the reason why this series of drives has won awards,
such as StorageReview's Safe Buy
award for the 80GB version.
Definitions for words used:
SCSI: Small Computer Systems Interface
RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
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