IBM's DDRS34560D - 4.5 Gig Ultra 2 SCSI LVD Drive


Article Title - Page 1

IBM's DDRS34560D - 4.5 Gig Ultra 2 SCSI LVD Drive

 

SCSI for the masses!

 
   
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.  

 
  • 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
 

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...
       

 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.

 

 


 

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.

 
       

Benchmarks

 

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
 
       
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.  
       

 

 

 

  Cached Reads Cached Writes
Deskstar 91.5 82.2
Ultrastar SCSI 101.7 82.2
 
Getting data off the disk is SCSI's forte. Here the Ultrastar out paces the Deskstar again.  

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.

 
   

The DDRS34560D gets a Hot Hardware Temp-O-Meter Rating of....

90

-Davo

 

Tags:  DDR, S3, IBM, drive, Ultra, 560, CSI, SCSI, Ive, ULT

Related content