Quantum Atlas 10K II & Adaptec 29160 Review (Page 4/4)

Posted: September 8, 2000
Written by: Dan "Tweak Monkey" Kennedy

Benchmark: Homemade Tests

Just for kicks I decided to try a couple more tests out on my own before making conclusions about this drive's performance.

First I ran Quake 3; but I already explained how that went. The drive made the normally-rough spots perfectly smooth. The same went for the Atlas 10K.

Unreal Tournament showed the same sort of performance. Nothing was too much for the drive... bots didn't slow it down much (these are mostly CPU dependent) and the hard drive rarely read long enough to make the game skip a heart beat.

The final major performance evaluation I threw at the drive was a large file copying test. The file was actually a "DivX" rip of Romeo Must Die (don't worry folks, I own it!). The file size is 683 MB.
Copying Atlas 10K II (making a copy onto the same drive) took 63 seconds
Copying Atlas 10K II -> Atlas 10K took 29 seconds
Copying Atlas 10K (making a copy onto the same drive) took 105 seconds
Copying Atlas 10K -> Atlas 10K II took 34 seconds
Copying Atlas 10K II -> ATA33 18 GB 5400 RPM (IDE) took 85 seconds
Copying ATA33 (making a copy on the same drive) took 423 seconds
Copying ATA33 -> Atlas 10K II took 111 seconds

For copying large files, there is simply no comparison between SCSI and IDE (at least ATA33; ATA66 would probably do better, but still not good enough).

Conclusion

I can say quite honestly this is the best product I've ever had in my system. Sure, it may cost double what my video card costs (which BTW isn't even available yet), but it's probably worth every cent.

Atlas 10K II Overall Rating: 9.6/10.0

These are just about (if not) the best 10,000 SCSI hard drives on the market right now. The performance is astounding, and even with a 10,000 RPM rotational speed, these drives rival the 15,000 RPM competitors (and kill most of the 10,000 RPM competitors). The price of these drives is very high (I found this drive online for around $1000), but for this kind of performance, it's worth it. Just imagine a few of these drives in a RAID array with striping and mirroring. *Drooooool*....

Adaptec 29160 Overall Rating: 9.8/10.0

The performance of this card is simply amazing! It packs everything you could need in the package, including a terminated UW160 SCSI cable. The price is a bit high, but these cards can still be found for as cheap as $180 online; which isn't too shabby for a high-end piece of hardware such as this. For more information, visit Adaptec.com.

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