Quantum's Atlas 10K II Ultra160 SCSI Drive

Quantum's Atlas 10K II Ultra160 SCSI Drive
Taking advantage of all that bandwidth

8/27/00 - By  Dave "Davo" Altavilla

HotHardware's Test System Our test bed

Full Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 933EB, Abit SE6 i815 Motherboard, 128MB Corsair PC133 CAS2 SDRAM, Quantum Atlas V 18G and Atlas 10K II 36G  Ultra160 SCSI Hard Drives, Adaptec 29160 Ultra160 64 bit PCI SCSI Card (supplied by Outside Loop Computers ), NVidia GeForce2 Ultra, Pioneer 10X DVD/40X CD ROM, Win 98SE, DirectX 7.0a

Installation and Setup on the Atlas 10K II Ultra160 SCSI couldn't be easier

There really isn't all that much to discuss when it comes to installing a SCSI drive these days.  We used the Adaptec 29160 Ultra160 SCSI card as we did in the Atlas V review.  The drive was partitioned and formatted with Win98SE and we set it up as a blank test drive in our system booting off of a separate drive in an effort to isolate the drive from system overhead during testing and benchmarks.   In the event you were wondering what the whole set up looks like,  here is a shot of the system.

We need some tidying up! 
Click image for view of Ultra160 Cable, Drives and Adapter Card

OK, settle down you hard core Neat Freaks out there.  We realize this case needs a serious cable reorganization. What we wanted to show you was the Ultra160 SCSI cabling, the back side of the drives and the top of the Adaptec Ultra160 card.  This is basically the physical representation of our set up.  The software drivers for the Adaptec card did the rest of the work.  Even though Ultra160 SCSI is a High End Drive Subsystem, life was pretty easy going during installation.

Benchmarks With The Atlas 10K II New levels of performance were achieved

In our first round of testing we used SiSoft's Sandra Drive Benchmark to get a baseline on this drive's I/O performance.  Here are the results.

SiSoft Sandra Hard Drive Benchmark

We have seen some RAID O Array performance numbers that were higher than this but this is by far the fastest single headed drive performance we have seen to date in the Sandra Test.  Here Sandra reports the drive's seek time at the advertised 5ms ( ok 4.7 was specified, close enough) and Sequential Read and Write Bandwidth right around the high end of the spec 40MB/sec.

This is a real good showing for first pass numbers but let's dig a little deeper.