Quantum Fireball Plus LM 30 Gig 7200 RPM ATA66 IDE Hard Drive
Introduction
With hard
drive capacity booming, most of us are in awe of a 30.0 gigabyte hard drive.
What would a person do with all that room? Well, with the large file sizes
of games, MP3s, OSes, and software packages, a huge hard drive might be a
good long-term investment. Plus, you could easily backup your data into a
separate partition on your drive in case something goes crazy with the partition
containing your OS.
The Rise
of ATA66
Hard drive
technology has been stuck at ATA33 for several years. However, it has really
never posed problems with speed bottlenecks until recently. Motherboards now
have the capability to handle more throughput in the IDE controller.
Along with
the updated IDE controllers, the simple IDE cable was upgraded. Newer cables
have double the density, and therefore have a finer look to them. Another
giva-a-way is a blue end on the cable that plugs into the motherboard. Unfortunately,
with the new technology comes compatibility problems, therefore you may not
be able to run a simple IDE drive as a slave device using your ATA66 cable.
What if your
motherboard does not support ATA66, but you want to buy a drive for the future?
You should have no troubles using an ATA66 drive with a ATA33 controller,
it will just not be as fast since it is not under optimal conditions.
Overall,
you will want to buy an ATA66 drive no matter what kind of a clunker you currently
have for a motherboard. When you upgrade, you will already have a good hard
drive ready to go. Then you can see that ~15% performance increase.
Description
& Specifications
The hard drive is one
of the most vulnerable components in your computer. They are susceptible to
shock, dust, electrostatic sources, and age. When you look for a hard drive,
you want quality and a good warranty.
The Fireball Plus has
a three year warranty, and claims to innovative shock protection. I don't
know if the warranty covers data retrieval, as I could not find any information
on it. My guess would be that it does not. That means if your HD goes broke,
you have probably lost all your data.
Hard drive performance
depends on many variables, so I will give you some specifications and explain
them.
|
Average
Seek Time
|
8.5
ms |
|
Average
Latency
|
4.17
ms |
|
Rotational
Speed
|
7200
RPM |
|
Start
Time
|
15
sec |
|
Disk
Transfer
|
66.6
MB/sec |
|
Buffer
Size
|
2
MB |
Seek time is how long
it takes to find the data on the hard drive. Latency is how long the drive
takes to respond to a command. Rotational speed is how fast it spins, and
7200 PRM means it is a fast hard drive, as most have been 5400. The start
time means how fast it takes to go from not spinning to 7200 RPM. The disk
transfer is how fast the drive can send data in/out. This is an ATA66 drive.
A large buffer like 2 MB allows for better (smoother) performance, to put
it simply.
Overall, these are good
numbers for a hard drive, except for the start time, as that should ideally
be down around 10 secs. This is how long you have to wait for your computer
to come out of sleep mode.
