Maxtor Atlas 15K II

Note: Since the publication of this review, this drive has been retested under Testbed4, a newer hardware/software/benchmark platform. Please see this article for updated results. This review remains for reference purposes only.

Maxtor Atlas 15K II Capacities Model Number Capacity 8E036L0 37 GB 8E073L0 73 GB 8E147L0 147 GB Lowest Real-Time Price: Introduction With reviews of the Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 and Fujitsu's MAU3147 under our belt, it may be safe to say that the highly-anticipated crop of next-generation drives has not quite lived up to the lofty hopes of many. When accompanied by an appropriate buffer segmentation scheme, the 15K.4 manages to improve a bit over its predecessor in a single-user setup. In a similar vein, the MAU3147 shatters non-server performance marks. Both drives, however, come up short when contrasted with last-generation drives in server performance, the most important area for the vast majority of the drives' target market.

We enter an era where higher density does not necessarily translate into greater single-drive performance. It seems now more than ever that tightly-packed tracks, blistering speed, and solid reliability compete with one another for a manufacturer's attention. Reliability, of course, can not be sacrificed to improve the other two factors. So, in the quest to climb to pack bits ever closer, it appears that the performance increases we have automatically associated with next-generation drives are hardly guaranteed.

Hopes rest with Maxtor's Atlas 15K II to buck the trend. Although it is the last of the 37 GB/platter 15,000 RPM drives to hit our testbed, the Atlas actually hit general channel availability before the competition. Like the Cheetah 15K.4 and Fujitsu MAU, the 15K II incorporates up to four platters to achieve a flagship capacity of 147 GB. Maxtor's seek time specifications vary with platter count- 3.1, 3.2, and 3.4 milliseconds respectively for the one-, two-, and four-disk units. A standard eight-megabyte buffer rounds out the offering.

With the 15K II, Maxtor at last makes the move to fluid-dynamic bearing (FDB) motors. Through reduced metal-metal contact and a better-isolated spindle shaft, FDB motor drives boast increased reliability while also reducing noise floors. An enterprise-standard 5-year warranty backs the drive.

Maxtor has initially shipped the Atlas 15K II equipped with a standard Ultra320 parallel SCSI configuration. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)'s time is almost upon us however- it is not unreasonable to expect an SAS version of the drive once controllers and other support infrastructures hit the market.

As a new-breed 15,000 RPM drive, the 15K II targets the most demanding storage applications around: heavy-load file and web servers, data mining/warehousing, busy transaction servers, and other uses where best-of-breed random access performance is mandatory. In the following tests, the Atlas is compared against the following drives for the subsequent reasons:

Maxtor Atlas 15K (73 GB)	Manufacturer's previous-generation unit
Fujitsu MAU3147 (147 GB)	Current-generation competing unit
Fujitsu MAS3735 (73 GB)	Previous-generation competing unit
Hitachi Ultrastar 15K73 (73 GB)	Previous-generation competing unit
Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 (147 GB)	Current-generation competing unit
Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 (73 GB)	Previous-generation competing unit