How good is the Maxtor/Quantum 18.4GB Atlas 10k III u160?

[NFS4]

Well, I wanted to go SCSI, so this is one I got on the way from FS/FT along with an LSI SYM21002 (no need for u160 right now). So how is this drive as far as performance and drive noise?

I looked at some performance #'s on Storage Review compared to my current WD 80BB and it whips it ass How much of a real-world difference would I see?

 

[BD231]

I'm looking to get the same drive, from what I hear they offer the best performance to noise ratio. I'm running a 2940UW with a 10,000rpm cheetah that has a max transfer rate of about 16 to 20mb per sec and access times are better than my 40gig 7,200rpm WD, so that thing should fly!

 

[rockhard]

If you just game and general desktop i dont feel the difference is all that noticeable over a fast IDE drive.
Where i find SCSI shines is when you have several HD intensive apps hitting the drive at the same time, the data queing of the SCSI interface whoops IDE badly.
Saying that, booting to desktop is faster than IDE with less time spent waiting to finish OS loading while sat at desktop.
If you do any ripping plus general multitasking you should see a noiceable improvement over IDE as the degradation of performance is far more linear than IDE which chokes real quick under multi app drive access.
Noise - Idle a bit louder than my D740X's but not noticeably. Seeks though are quite noisy but nowhere near as bad as a 15K X15. Kinda half way between an X15 and an IDE HD like the D740X.
Theres no going back now
Once youve used a SCSI HD like the 10K drives you will feel hard done by using an IDE rig i reckon.

 

[NFS4]

<< If you just game and general desktop i dont feel the difference is all that noticeable over a fast IDE drive.
Where i find SCSI shines is when you have several HD intensive apps hitting the drive at the same time, the data queing of the SCSI interface whoops IDE badly.
Saying that, booting to desktop is faster than IDE with less time spent waiting to finish OS loading while sat at desktop.
If you do any ripping plus general multitasking you should see a noiceable improvement over IDE as the degradation of performance is far more linear than IDE which chokes real quick under multi app drive access.
Noise - Idle a bit louder than my D740X's but not noticeably. Seeks though are quite noisy but nowhere near as bad as a 15K X15. Kinda half way between an X15 and an IDE HD like the D740X.
Theres no going back now
Once youve used a SCSI HD like the 10K drives you will feel hard done by using an IDE rig i reckon. >>


Well, I do a lot of CD burning and CD copying along with TV recording (and afterwards ripping to DIVX). My IDE drive loves to churn during DIVX rips:disgust: And I heavily mulitask in general.

 

[Rand]

Arguably the best 10K SCSI drive available for desktop usage scenarios.

 

[rockhard]

<< Well, I do a lot of CD burning and CD copying along with TV recording (and afterwards ripping to DIVX). My IDE drive loves to churn during DIVX rips:disgust: And I heavily mulitask in general.
>>


You sound like you will benefit from SCSI.
Copying a CD to ISO file while doing a RIP plus all your other activities going to be much more pleasent as long as youve got the CPU to hang all that activity on.
Looking at your rig maybe you would also benefit from going SMP also?
Just hope you dont get the idea i have of trying to go raid1 SCSI for a rig thats responsive beyond your highest expectations - gets kinda expensive
I wish i could afford to go SCSI for all my rigs now but i cant afford

 

[NFS4]

<<

<< Well, I do a lot of CD burning and CD copying along with TV recording (and afterwards ripping to DIVX). My IDE drive loves to churn during DIVX rips:disgust: And I heavily mulitask in general.
>>


You sound like you will benefit from SCSI.
Copying a CD to ISO file while doing a RIP plus all your other activities going to be much more pleasent as long as youve got the CPU to hang all that activity on.
Looking at your rig maybe you would also benefit from going SMP also?
Just hope you dont get the idea i have of trying to go raid1 SCSI for a rig thats responsive beyond your highest expectations - gets kinda expensive
I wish i could afford to go SCSI for all my rigs now but i cant afford >>



Dual CPU's and SCSI RAID are out of my pricing range

 

[rockhard]

<< Dual CPU's and SCSI RAID are out of my pricing range >>


Aint it about time you got some sponsorship for your Ace Reporter job? :nudge to anand;

 

[Rellik]

Hi N4S, about the drive and SCSI/IDE in general:

I have just recently upgraded my old rig and let me tell you that the
Atlas 10K III is the best price/performance drive in SCSI right now.
SR is so right on track. I went from a 4 year old 7200 512k IBM SCSI
drive as a boot and 7200 2MB SCSI drive for progs / IDE 5400 storage
to an Atlas 10K III for boot/progs and scratchdisk and 80GB seagate cuda IV for storage. Not taking my change from single PIII 700 to smp
1800XP/MP into acount, the speed of the drive is so fast that small apps that you install from the SCSI disk onto it are so fat that there is barely time to see the progress bar. I multitask like hell (premiere,photoshop,winamp,opera,eudora,background aps like firewall and virus scanner and I have to say: wow. 2 Days ago I forgot
that i was still running dungeon siege(went alt-tab to desktop) when I tested a new refreshrate tool with Medal of Honor. It was slower of course, and I thought maybe the hickups (they were really not that bad) came from the refreshtool when I went back to
the desktop and realized DS was still in the background..

Sorry for the long post, but in essence: Even if you don´t have smp,
a 10K III as a boot drive will at least give you some multitasking plus that you can combine with a good IDE drive so ripping can be done with fewer slowdowns. The responsiveness ppl talk about in windows is 75% smp, 25% SCSI in my opinion.

 

[NFS4]

Now I'm trying to decide if I should keep my 80GB Western Digital 80BB or just sell it? I'm only using 8.5GB of hard drive space (3.5 of which is MP3's). I think I'm just going to sell it.

 

[Oyeve]

SCSI just rocks man. I went scsi years ago and never looked back. The only IDE device in my system is a cdr. And if they made a scsi drive that was faster than 40x I'd toss that ide drive also. SCSI raid is the best, it would be even better if they made win9x drivers but I guess I can live with that. Gaming, ripping, burning just about everything is just plain better and faster. the Quantum drive are definately great drives. My current main rig uses 16 u160 10k rpm drives, its a mix of Quantum, IBM, and Fujitsu drives all rated at the same spec. 7 drives are on a SCSI u160 raid card in a RAID 5, 7 are on a Adaptec 29160, and two are on an adaptec 2940uw2 which is a waste as that card only does 40mbs. I can run all 16 drives at the same time, and while it obviously slows down due to the PCI bus choking it is still MUCH faster than running just 2 IDE hds at the same time, even it they are ata133.

 

[xylem]

With just an 18 gig drive you're not leaving much storage space. Unless you plan on burning all your divx to cd, maybe keep the 80 gigs? I've heard really good things about that scsi drive btw. I have recently gone to an all-scsi system and i quite like it (coming from relatively high-performance ide).

 

[NFS4]

<< With just an 18 gig drive you're not leaving much storage space. Unless you plan on burning all your divx to cd, maybe keep the 80 gigs? I've heard really good things about that scsi drive btw. I have recently gone to an all-scsi system and i quite like it (coming from relatively high-performance ide). >>


I don't USE the space. I never have more than 8.5GB being used at one time and that's with ALL of my programs and MP3's installed. I've NEVER been a space hog. The only reason why got the 80GB drive was b/c it was on sale. I had a 30GB drive before that and was only using 7 GB.

 

[xtreme2k]

I am actually thinking of upgrading my system to SCSI as well.

I looked at the Maxtor Atlas 10K3 and compared it with the Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP. At where I live the price difference between the 2 is about 35%. 35% does look a huge difference but if I factor the Tekram U160 card into it, the overall difference is only ~15%. At 15% extra I would take the 15000rpm drive

 

[WebDude]

I just upgraded from an Atlas 10k II (sorry not the III) to a Cheetah X15-36LP a couple of months ago. The prices on the X15-36LP have finally droped to a point where I consider them reasonable (certainly not cheap). Anyway the performance boost has been incredible, and the X15-36LP is quiter and does not run any hotter than my old Atlas. Once again it was an Atlas II, which is earlier and inferior to the Atlas III.

WebDude

 

[NFS4]

<< I just upgraded from an Atlas 10k II (sorry not the III) to a Cheetah X15-36LP a couple of months ago. The prices on the X15-36LP have finally droped to a point where I consider them reasonable (certainly not cheap). Anyway the performance boost has been incredible, and the X15-36LP is quiter and does not run any hotter than my old Atlas. Once again it was an Atlas II, which is earlier and inferior to the Atlas III.

WebDude >>


Well, I got my Atlas III for $130 shipped. The lowest price on the Cheetah X15-36LP is $210 + shipping on Pricewatch. Big difference And no one is crazy enough to be selling their Cheetah X15-36LP

 

[Thor86]

For more info go to http://scsi.radified.com/.

10K RPM drives are blazingly fast, but 15K are waaaay faster for EVERYTHING you do on your computer regardless. But you have to pay to play.

 

[BD231]

10K RPM drives are blazingly fast, but 15K are waaaay faster for EVERYTHING you do on your computer regardless. But you have to pay to play.

Tom's hardware dosn't report them to be that much faster than 10,000rpm drives due to the less dense storage on the disk. Im curious, have you (or anyone reading this) actualy seen the difference between a 10,000rpm drive and a 15,000rpm drive?, how big of a difference is there?

 

[sharkeeper]

<< And no one is crazy enough to be selling their Cheetah X15-36LP >>



I got rid of all of mine!

Cheers!

 

[GT1999]

<<

I got rid of all of mine!

Cheers! >>




Why?

 

[sharkeeper]

Noise, heat and no real world performance gains that I could attribute to having such little space. It was a waste of $2k but a lesson learned.

In some applications that I do everyday, the SCSI array was slower than a stripe running on a pair of WDC 1200JB drives!

Before you say there was something wrong with the setup, there was nothing wrong at all. As a matter of fact my setup consistently (with the exception of access times which were identical) got 15% better benchmarks than SR. I would attribute this to faster CPU and much more memory.

Cheers!

 

[rockhard]

sharkeeper - Just curious - What kind of apps and how many were you running?

 

[pm]

My experiences are not too far from Shar's. I had a RAID 5 array of 9.1 (10krpm) Cheetahs that I used on my home system for doing design simulations at home. This was noisy, and hot and not that much faster than IDE. So I switched to IBM 36LZX's (10k rpm) U160 SCSI drives and ran then RAID 0 with daily backups onto an IDE drive.

In both cases, I didn't see that the cost justified the speed gain and the noise particularly bothered me. Even the IBM's, which were much quieter than the Cheetahs - were loud enough to keep me awake at night with them two doors away from me (I'd run simulations all night long). I posted on here at the time and got pretty handily slapped down by the crowd who love their SCSI, and was told that the main problem was that I was using older drives (IBM 36LZX's aren't exactly speed demons) or the wrong equipment. Then I ran out of space on the drives and was looking at spending a lot more money to upgrade to the 100GB or so that I needed in the RAID 0 or RAID 5 array. When I saw an IDE WD1000BB drive on sale before Christmas at Sam's for $125 (after $100 MIR), I ended up selling or returning (back to my company) all of the above and now make due with this drive and a nightly IDE backup to a drive that NFS thinks is ironic as a backup drive. I'm pretty pleased, the 1000BB is not a quiet drive, but it's vastly more quiet than the other two 10k SCSI drives and the performance decrease in the simulations that I run is minimal.

Having said all of this, my workstations here at work all use either 36LZX's or Atlas III 10k's and I like them - particularly the Atlas III's. They are quiet and fast and do the job very well. I don't need them myself, but I appreciate them when someone else is footing the bill.

 

[sharkeeper]

<< What kind of apps and how many were you running? >>



Mostly NLE; audio data samples from 192kHz to 3 MHz at 20,24, and 32bits.

I also have many applications open at once; sometimes 75 browser windows and 40~50 documents open if I get busy and don't close them down.

Having 2048MB of RAM is definitely, without a doubt very helpful in my case. Perhaps with 64 bit OS's and better hardware, 64GB+ won't be farfetched!

It's quite a bit different when the computer is a tool and not a toy!

Cheers!

 

[rockhard]

<< I also have many applications open at once; sometimes 75 browser windows and 40~50 documents open if I get busy and don't close them down.
>>


I hope you use Suspend to Ram with an UPS with that kind of setup.
Id hate to have to reopen up that lot