Quantum's Fireball Plus AS 40

Quantum's Fireball Plus AS 40
Mainstream ATA100 performance @ 7200 RPM

3/5/01 - By  Dave Altavilla

We won't bore you with the installation procedures of this drive.  We'll assume that if you are reading this article that most likely you have the technology and know-how to plug in the connectors, partition and format a standard EIDE Drive.  The Quantum Fireball Plus AS is no different in this respect.  Let's move on to the last few details of this drive before we get to the benchmarks.

Setup and General Performance Characteristics QDT, Size and Heat...

Once partitioned, we proceeded to format the 40 Gig Fireball Plus AS we evaluated, and double check the size after setup.

As you can see, the Fireball Plus AS does deliver the full 40G of data area plus a few extra bytes. 

A word on QDT (Quiet Drive Technology):

The Fireball Plus AS is one of the quietest drives we have ever tested here at the H.H. labs.  Quantum's QDT (those marketing guys really love acronyms) or Quiet Drive Technology, definitely performs up to its claims.  This drive is significantly quieter than the IBM Deskstar 75GXP drives that we have here in the lab.  If you are building a system for a corporate environment or simply want peace and quiet, you can't do better than the Fireball Plus AS, at least acoustically speaking.

Thermals:

Finally, the drive also performs fairly well with respect to heat output or the lack thereof.  The Fireball Plus AS under normal operation, in our P4 system which is fairly toasty at best, became just barely warm to the touch.  We felt comfortable letting it run in standard ambient air temp inside the case without the need for addition air flow or fans around the bay in which it was housed.

Our Test System Pentium 4 setup with an ATA100 interface

- Asus P4T Motherboard with Pentium 4 Processor @ 1.5GHz.

- Intel D850GB Motherboard with Pentium 4 Processor @ 1.5GHz.

- 256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM,

- IBM DTLA307045 45Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

- Quantum Fireball Plus AS 40 - 40Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

- nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card,

- Intel 100tx PCI NIC, 56K PCI Modem

- Sound Blaster Live Sound Card,

- Hitachi DVD ROM Drive,

- WindowsME 

- Direct X 8.0 and nVidia reference drivers version 7.17

- Intel chipset drivers version 2.60a
 

Benchmarks - SiSoft Sandra A quick take...

 
In our first battery of tests, we fired up a nice easy round of SiSoft Sandra Drive Benchmarks and compared it to our in house IBM Deskstar 75GXP scores, on the same system.