Ultra ATA 66 Hard Drive Roundup - March 2000

Conclusion

Even before beginning to benchmark the different drives, it was expected that the higher rotational speed drives would outperform the slower units. Our testing did not debunk this theory, as the 7200 RPM units all vied for top places in the charts, with the slower 5400 RPM units falling to the bottom of the heap in all but a few of the tests. This isn’t surprising, being that faster rotation speeds equate into faster reads/writes off the platters and offers the added benefit of reduced latency. While the drives incorporate various other features to separate one another, the most bang for your buck, outside of storage capacity, is going to be obtained from a drives rotational speed.

This may lead many to wonder why we even bothered to include the 5400-RPM drives in the roundup. We felt that a great many people are being fed so much hype with the “2x faster sustained data transfer rates” so many manufactures splash all over their boxes when they are promoting the benefits of Ultra ATA 66 over Ultra ATA 33, that we wanted to drive home the fact that simply being an Ultra ATA 66 compatible unit does not automatically make it a faster drive. There are other factors involved as well, most notable among them the rotational speed of a drive.

Our benchmark tests revealed what an impact rotational speed has upon performance, and this will be a more relevant factor in choosing a drive than simply, one uses Ultra ATA 33 and the other Ultra ATA 66. While there are still some differences between the reviewed drives at the same rotational speed, as the results clearly showed, the drives were mainly broken into two distinct categories by their rotational speed. The 5400-RPM units were consistently at or near the bottom, while the 7200-RPM units were always at or near the top.

As for this round up, four of the drives were 7200-RPM units, with the two 5400-RPM units falling far short in terms of performance. As mentioned above, the 7200-RPM units simply send the slower drives to the bottom of the heap, so unless you can get a great deal on one of them and you are simply looking for the most storage space for the dollar, we would recommend going with a 7200-RPM unit. So with that said, and the fact that this review is about performance, we are left to choose among the remaining four contenders. The IBM Deskstar 34GXP and Western Digital Expert 25.7 are virtually clones of one another, so the choice between those two drives simply comes down to price. If you are deciding between these two drives, just grab the one you can get the best deal on.

While the Quantum drive turned in respectable results and held its own in many of the tests, it just didn’t run away with any of them or shine by itself enough to be considered a top candidate. It turned in average results and should be considered an average drive. This, coupled with the fact that it is one of the higher priced drives of the group, leaves it out as a candidate for the top spot. With the IBM Deskstar 34 GXP and WD Expert taking top honors in most of the charts, and with the Seagate Barracuda running away with the disk transfer tests, your overall choice becomes fairly obvious. If you do a lot of video and/or sound editing, or frequently perform other tasks that require a lot of sustained data transfers, the Seagate Barracuda ATA would be the way to go.

The Seagate Barracuda comfortably led in the Disk Transfer category, with a 4 MB/sec lead over the IBM 34 GXP and WD Expert drives. On the other hand, the WD Expert and IBM 34GXP drives led most of the other tests, with the Seagate coming in second in most cases. If you mainly do tasks that require a lot of access to a disk, but not necessarily need continuous sustained data transfers, such as most general applications, gaming included, you would be better off going with either the IBM 34 GXP or WD Expert units. As stated earlier, these two drives are almost identical, and the choice between them comes down to price.

In the future, we plan to have many more storage reviews and we wanted to get the ball rolling quickly, which is why we debuted with only 6 drives. We will also be taking a look at faster offerings from companies such as Maxtor, so they will have a better chance for competing, as we plan to continue to review 7200-RPM, Ultra ATA 66 drives on a regular basis.  We also plan to be taking a look at a few SCSI drives, as well as getting into other storage related devices, such as CDRW and DVD drives.