The untouchable
Quantum Atlas 10k II remains out of reach for this newest contender in
WinBench 99. The MAJ's score of about 6.6 MB/sec in the
WinBench 99Business Disk WinMark trails that of the Atlas 10k II by a margin approaching 25%. Though the gap narrows in the
WinBench 99High-End Winmark, the MAJ nonetheless continues to lag by almost 13%.
We should take the time to point out that given these figures, the MAJ would compare unfavorably to, say, today's swiftest ATA drive, the IBM Deskstar 75GXP. In such a comparison, the 10K SCSI MAJ lags behind the Deskstar by 14% in the Business Disk WinMark. In the High-End, the Fujitsu manages to slide by the IBM by 4%... certainly a slim victory for a drive that sports a transfer rate 15% to 44% faster and a seek time fully 45% faster than the other unit. What's the conclusion? That the MAJ is a slow drive, not able to match a 7200 RPM ATA disk? Certainly not. Under such criteria, the Cheetah 36LP or even IBM's own Ultrastar 36LZX would fail to set themselves apart from the best of ATA. Rather, the situation once again illustrates that WinBench 99 is well past its prime when it comes to disk performance measurement. Come on ZD, let's get a new version out that'll defeat the tweaks that have crept into the firmware of modern drives.
In the mean time, however, we have another tool that gives us a much better picture of relative drive performance: IOMeter.
IOMeter Performance...
