Quantum Atlas 10K II
Quantum are without doubt the leading hard drive manufacturer in the world. With the latest revisions of drives just being announced, the Ultra 320 drives, I thought it was time to have a look at the 10,000-RPM Atlas 10K II, 18.4 GB Edition, U160 drive. When buying a hard drive, the most important thing is the speed of the drive. The combination of the speed of the drive and the access time can mean the difference between a fast system and a slow one, which is often one of the things which people forget when they are building their own system.Quantum has been around since 1980, and since then they have developed into being one of the world's leading storage solution providers, with the latest product being their Snap storage solution. They make these network attached storage systems, solid state drives, and also tape and hard drives. Quantum developed the IDE region ATA-33, ATA-66 and ATA-100 are AT-interface evolutions invented by Quantum - the most recent being ATA-100. The major difference being double the bandwidth and also the integrity, by using 80 wire cables.
Quantum has been at the forefront of technology for quite a while, and has realized that their developments have help push hard drive performance. Like processors, hard drives increase in speed by around 38% a year, so a hard drive has a 2 year life span at the moment, if you want the latest kit that is. This 3.5" half-height drive is part of the Atlas range, which has been used in servers for the last few years, as with a lot of the Quantum hard drives. They work on something, which is already good, and add to it. For example this also happened with the Quantum Fireball LM range.
Densities of 7.3GB per platter, together with 10,000 rpm speeds, the VERY low 4.7ms access times, and the u160 connector, allow the Quantum Atlas 10K II series of drives to deliver the best performance needed for today’s high end PCs and mid-range servers. It is targeted to be used in high-end servers, Unix or NT departmental servers and other high-performance servers and workstations running high I/O applications. It can of course also be used in high-end desktop PC's but might be a bit expensive for this.
The main feature of this drive is the very low seek time; it is lower than any IDE drive on the market and also than most of the SCSI drives available. It has an average seek of 4.7ms compared with the 8ms of the Seagate u160 range, and the 8ms of most IDE drives. This makes a massive difference, it eliminates latency from the data transfer across the drive. This blazing 4.7ms coupled with the 3.0ms rotational latency, and the 41MB Peak sustained data throughput place this is the best SCSI drive on the market.
In addition to all of these high specs, Quantum also uses many other features in the drives. This includes the Quantum shock protection system, which helps to protect the drive and data against rough handling and usage during installation. It also has the Quantum data protection system. This will allow the sure to find out if the drive is faulty, basically it says "Hello Mr Hard drive are you ok" and after a few seconds of testing the drive will come back with the answer. This helps the user to work out if they need to pull the drive or find the other problems within the system.
Our model is the 10,000-RPM Atlas 10K II 18.4GB hard drive. This is the top-end drive in the family (bar the new released Atlas 10K III but we will have a review of this drive as soon as it is available in the channel ;).)
All of the Atlas range of drives are backed by a standard 5 year warranty, and you can check on Quantum’s site if you have registered, to see how much time is remaining on the warranty. Also you can see any other information and if they have removed any of the drives from circulation. Other useful things on the Quantum site include the drive checker which we mentioned earlier the DPS.
Specs: -
The Quantum Atlas 10K II range of drives are available in 4 sizes from 9, 18.4, 36,8, 74.3 GB's All of the drives are using the u160 drive interface, and the 7.4GB per platter drive data densities, and of course are 10,000 rpm in rotational speeds; they also include the 8MB ECC data buffer.
The Atlas 10k II is Quantum's second shot at the Ultra160 SCSI interface. Our old test bench had a 2940u2w card in it which maxed out at 80m.second, but the drive has a 160m/s interface, even thought the platter to buffer movement is only 47.5m/s this is way within the 2940u2w limits, but we decided we needed to put a 29160 is there to get the full achievement of the drive, but to be honest there is no need to go out and get one straight away, get the drives then wait for the card. Even with a 2940u2w the drive was still very fast.
Important Information
Rotations Per Minute 10000 RPM
Gigabytes Per Platter 7.3 GB
Seek Time 4.7 ms
Buffer Size 8192 KB
Warranty 5 years
Rated Idle Noise 38 dB
Power Consumption 10 watts
Full Specs :-
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Form
Factor |
3.5
inch |
3.5
inch |
3.5
inch |
3.5
inch |
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Formatted
Capacity (MB1) |
9,200 |
18,400 |
36,700 |
73,400 |
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Disks |
2 |
3 |
5 |
10 |
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Head/Recording
Surfaces |
3 |
6 |
10 |
20 |
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Bytes
per Sector |
512
to 524 |
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Maximum
Areal Density |
7.7 |
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Encoding/Detection
Method |
50/52
RLL PRML |
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Typical
Seek Times2 (ms) |
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Average
(read) |
4.7 |
4.7 |
4.7 |
5.2 |
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Track-to
Track |
0.6 |
0.6 |
0.6 |
0.6 |
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Full
Stroke |
12 |
12 |
12 |
13 |
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Average
Rotational Latency (ms) |
3.0 |
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Rotational
Speed (RPM) |
10,000 |
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Internal
Data Rate (Mb/sec) |
280
to 478 |
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Sustained
Throughput (MB/sec) |
24
to 40 |
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Data
Errors (per bits read) |
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Recoverable |
10
per 1012 |
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Nonrecoverable |
1
per 1014 |
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Warranty3
(years) |
5 |
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Dimensions—inches
(mm) |
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Width |
4.00
(101.6) |
4.00
(101.6) |
4.00
(101.6) |
4.00
(101.6) |
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Length |
5.76
(146.5) |
5.76
(146.5) |
5.76
(146.5) |
5.76
(146.5) |
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Height |
1.00
(25.8) |
1.00
(25.8) |
1.00
(25.8) |
1.64
(41.6) |
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Weight—pounds
(kg) |
1.4
(0.64) |
1.4
(0.64) |
1.5
(0.68) |
2.4
(1.10) |
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Temperature
(@C) |
5
to 50 |
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Sound
Power (bels, Idle) |
3.7 |
3.7 |
3.8 |
4.2 |
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Shock
(G, 2 ms, 1/2 Sine) |
250 |
250 |
250 |
200 |
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Vibration |
2.0 |
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We ran the tests in our standard test rig, which specs are: -
Coolermaster ATCS 200 Case
Abit KT7 Raid
1Ghz TBird CPU
Alpha PAL Cooler
Voodoo 5 5500
1 * Crucial 128meg PC133 Cas2 Dimm
1 * Mushkin 128Meg PC150 Cas2 Dimm
Quantum Viking 2 9.1 GB LVD SCSI DRIVE
Seagate Barracuda 50.1GB LVD
Soundblaster Live Soundcard
Adaptec 29160SCSI card
Pioneer 6xDVD/32xCD SCSI
Teac 32X CDRom SCSI
Please not there is NO Raid card in this machine, all benchmarks are done on a single drive, until we can get hold of an Adaptec Raid card to test with.
We set the system up with Windows 2000 a clean install as this is what all of
the high-end systems are using now. We also hooked it up to a brand new Adaptec
29160 card, 64bit edition. We are also comparing it to the Seagate Barracuda
50GB Drive (u2w LVD) That will give us a good representation, and also the
Quantum IDE drive.
We are to test the drive under :-
Si-Soft Sandra 99 Professional, and WinBench99
Temperature Tests
Another important part of a hard drive is to see how hot it gets, as if it is in
an overclocked system heat makes a big difference in impact to the overall
System stability. This test will be made with a standard probe taped to the
outside of the hard drive’s case. All measurements will be made with the
tested drive mounted in a normal drive bay, in a closed case. This wills most
represent the normal conditions the drive will run in; also we will record the
room temperature at the same time.
Temperature Results :-
Room temperature:- 17.5
Degrees C
Hard drive temperature:- 37.2 Degrees C (Without Active Cooling)
Results Si-Soft
Quantum Atlas 10K II
Seagate ATA
66 IDE Drive
Win bench Benchmarks :- (Under Win2K FAT32 Partion)
Its Business score of 12.3
MB/sec
The Atlas' High-End gained a result of 31.4 MB/sec
This drive is the quietest hard drive I have ever had, yes it does have a slight
noise on boot up but after that it is silent, quieter than most 7200rpm Drives
on the market. This is the perfect drive noise-wise for a lab or a room where
noise isn’t wanted but speed is. There is no way of measuring noise but If we
could this drive would come out as one of the quietest drives we have tested.
Overall, we think the Quantum Atlas 10K II is an excellent drive, very well
designed unit and will offer astounding performance and reliability for your
Storage needs.
Reviewed Drive: Quantum Atlas 10K II 18.4GB Hard Drive
Main Features: 10,000-RPM, Ultra 160 interface, 8 MB cache, 10.2 GB per
platter data densities, 8.5 ms average seek times and capacities of 9.1, 18.4,
36.8, And 74.4 GB’s.
Warranty: 5-years
Price: $350.00 (18.4GB model)
