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was good indeed, when we set up the Atlas V on
our new Adaptec 29160 card. The usual
concerns for proper termination need to be
observed but other than that, things couldn't be
easier. Of course you do require an
Ultra160 SCSI Card like the Adaptec, to run this
drive at the new Ultra160 spec. However,
it also supports legacy Ultra2 and Ultra SCSI
connections. Ultra2 will give you a max
burst transfer rate of 80BM/sec and Ultra SCSI
gives you 40MB/sec. So you ask, "why
not go top notch with Ultra160"? Our
sentiments exactly.
Here
is a shot of the Adaptec 29160 Ultra160 Card
that we used for the tests.
Click
image
That
is some serious hardware you are looking
at! This card is a 64 bit PCI card.
Take a look at the edge connector. It has
twice the number of pins as a standard 32 bit
card. However, you can plug the 29160 into
to any standard 32 bit PCI 2.1 compliant
slot. You'll still get Ultra160
performance but Adaptec notes 64 bit PCI will
give you optimal performance.
Unfortunately, there aren't any standard PC
motherboards that support this yet. As you
may know, this is in the works currently.
In any event, we had no performance issues with
a 32 PCI set up. More on this later.
Also,
take a look at the Ultra160 LVDSE Cable!
Talk about pin/wire count!
Click
image
The
drive partitioned and formatted quickly and
Windows 98SE recognized the drive as having the
full 18.3 Gig capacity. This was a
refreshing change as some of the other drives we
have tested, fell slightly short of their
specified capacity after set up. Quantum
gives you the full specified capacity
here.
A
Word On QDT
Quantum's
new Quite Drive Technology (QDT) is more than
just a marketing gimmick. Once we had the
drive set up and running, it was amazing to
actually hear the difference versus one of our
WD DMA66 drives. The only way I can
explain it was that the drive sounds
muffled. The Atlas V actually sounds like
it is encased tighter with better sound
dampening construction within the unit.
This is definitely the quietest drive I have
ever heard.
The
drive also runs fairly cool. It is warm to
the touch but not hot when under heavy
use. While idle in our case (which
admittedly has lots of ventilation) it remained
cool.
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