WinBench 99 measures the Cheetah 36XL's
access time at 8.5 milliseconds. Accounting for 3 milliseconds of rotational latency yields a measured
seek time of 5.5 milliseconds... right on the specs, something a bit unusual for Seagate these days. This means that despite its slightly higher specified seek time, the Cheetah 36XL measures in a full half millisecond lower than the
36LP.
Interestingly, though the Cheetah 36XL's higher areal density allows it to improve on the 36LP with an outer-zone transfer rate of 40.1 MB/sec, it doesn't quite match up to the highest rates offered by the Fujitsu MAJ or Quantum Atlas 10k II. Transfer rates "decay" very nicely, though, with nearly 24 gigs of the drive offering rates in excess of 36 megs/sec.
WinMarks...
