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IBM's
DDRS34560D - 4.5 Gig Ultra 2 SCSI LVD Drive
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SCSI
for the masses!
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| SCSI,
use to conjure up memories of difficult set up and lots of time
spent tweaking with settings in the SCSI BIOS trying to get a drive
to run at peak performance. Not so with many of today's SCSI Drives.
IBM has a full arsenal of high performance SCSI drives all of which
are all easily configured and set up due to Ultra 2 LVD SCSI
Features. I had this drive in, up and running in about 15 minutes.
This drive also has built in SCSI Termination. You have to terminate
the end of the cable in the chain that the last SCSI drive is on. We
only had one drive in our testbed and this allowed us to avoid the
somewhat bulky LVD SCSI Terminator. Now let's check the specs. |
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- Low Voltage
Differential(LVD) models (68 and 80 pin)
- SCSI-3
FAST-20 WIDE (40 MB/sec transfer)
- LVD FAST-40
WIDE (80 MB/sec transfer)
- Tagged
command queuing
- Average seek
time for read 7.5 msec
- Segmented
data buffer, 6x64K or 3x128K selectable
- Automatic
error recovery procedures for read and write commands
- Self
diagnostics on power on and resident diagnostics
- Dedicated
head landing zone
- Automatic
actuator lock
- Predictive
failure analysis (S.M.A.R.T. compliant)
- Magneto
resistive heads
- Connection
for external LED
- Sector servo
- SCAM 2
compliant
- On-board SCSI
bus terminator (50 & 68 pin models)
- Enhanced ECC
on the fly
- 3 - 1.5 Gig
Platters
- 7,200 RPM
Spindle Speed
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A
word or two on LVD SCSI...
LVD stands for
Low Voltage Differential. Esentially this is a whole new interface
for the SCSI format and provides the following benefits: Increased
bus data rates, Increased device connectivity, Increased design
flexibility, and Backward compatibility with Ultra SCSI.
Theoretical Data
Transfer Rates over the Wide Ultra 2 LVD SCSI Bus is 80MB/Sec. That
is 4X the throughput of standard Ultra SCSI which comes in at around
20MB/Sec. and 2X Standard Ultra 2 SCSI.
| So,
with the technical stuff out of the way, we set this little
nugget of technology up in our system with FAT 32 and as
follows... |
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Our
Test System
Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium 2 -333 Overclocked to 525,
Shuttle HOT-649A Dual Processor Motherboard, 128 MB of PC100 CAS2
RAM, IBM Deskstar 10GXP 10GB 7200 RPM EIDE UDMA Hard Drive, IBM
Ultrastar 4.5GB DDRS34560D 7200 RPM Ultra SCSI 2 Drive,
STB Velocity 4400 TNT w/ 16 MB AGP Video Card, Metabyte Wicked 3D
12MB Voodoo 2 PCI Card, Monster Sound MX300 PCI Audio Card, Toshiba
SDM1202 3rd. Gen. 4.8X DVD/32X CDROM, TNT Detonator Drivers.
A
single CPU set up was used to simulate mainstream performance.
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Overclocking
This drive did
as well with overclocking as its 9 Gig EIDE cousin, the Deskstar
version. We ran all tests at a totally hot front side bus speed of
105. This bus speed will cause lesser drives on the EIDE/PCI or
SCSI/PCI bus to crash. Not so for the Ultrastar. It was stable and
solid through all the tests.
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Benchmarks
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Winbench
99 Weighted Suite
Higher
Score Indicate Better Performance
| Deskstar |
Ultrastar |
| WinBench
99/Business Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
2740 |
3500 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/Bus:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
2740 |
3500 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:AVS/Express 3.4 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
6430 |
7130 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:FrontPage 98 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
36900 |
40900 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:MicroStation SE (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
8950 |
13300 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
9310 |
9390 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Photoshop 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
5380 |
ONT
FACE="Arial">4950 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Premiere 4.2 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
8440 |
8480 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Sound Forge 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
15200 |
11400 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Visual C++ 5.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
11500 |
10300 |
| WinBench
99/High-End Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
9310 |
9390 |
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| We
again matched this drive against its larger brother the 9 Gig
Desktar EIDE Drive also from IBM. As you can see LVD SCSI really
shines with respect to data throughput. Disk access for these two
drives was significantly better for the Ultrastar SCSI drive since
it has a 7.5ms average seek time vrs the Deskstar's 9 ms. times.
This is evident in the Business Disk Winmark Scores. |
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Cached
Reads |
Cached
Writes |
| Deskstar |
91.5 |
82.2 |
| Ultrastar
SCSI |
101.7 |
82.2 |
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| Getting
data off the disk is SCSI's forte. Here the Ultrastar out paces the
Deskstar again. |
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Overall
Impression
A SCSI drive for
me historically, has been an added expense that would be better
allocated to other peripherals in my system. Only high end
Multimedia Editing types and Server Stations could benefit from this
added throughput. However, this drive has a reasonable price tag at TJT
that allows it to be competitive to EIDE drives. I would have
prefered a little extra room as well but this is a subjective issue
where some people feel 4.5 Gig is enough. Overall I was very
impressed with the performance of this drive. The enhanced
throughput of Ultra SCSI 2 LVD really became obvious when
multitasking with several apps running on the desktop.
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The DDRS34560D
gets a Hot Hardware Temp-O-Meter Rating of....
90
-Davo
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