You may have heard that SCSI devices/controllers are sometimes difficult to setup and that's why they haven't been adopted heavily in the consumer market as of yet (well, that and the MUCH higher price of SCSI devices).  The reason SCSI devices are more difficult to setup than IDE devices is because they require special attention to termination of the chain and device ID's .  With all the latest cards having Plug and Play capability and many new motherboards coming with built-in Ultra2 or Ultra160/m SCSI controllers, you now only need to worry about setting up your chain of devices (and properly setting up the ID's) and terminating the chain, which really isn't that difficult.

We are going to use the Altas V with the on-board Adaptec AIC-7890 chip of the EPoX BXB-S Dual Slot-1 motherboard  (Read BXB-S Review).  This chip supports the Ultra2 SCSI LVD interface for a transfer rate of up to 80MB/s which is more than enough for a single drive. Unfortunately, we do not yet have an Ultra160/m SCSI card nor, a 64-bit PCI slot to place it in. 

On with the installation. I plugged in the supplied LVD cable that came with the EPoX board to the port on the motherboard and connected the first connector to the Atlas V and terminated the port after that one because I did not have any other SCSI devices connected to this system.  The drive came pre-configured to use ID 6 which is second on the SCSI chain priority list [from highest to lowest priority:  7 to 0, 15 to 8].  We booted up and the drive was detected on first attempt and we proceeded to install Windows 98 SE.

To test the performance of this drive, we will be using Ziff Davis' Winbench 99 Suite to test Business performance as well as High End Disk Performance.  We will also use SiSoft Sandra 99 Professional as an additional benchmark.  We will compare the Atlas V to the Atlas 10K to see how it compares to an older 10,000 RPM drive as well as the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Vantage.

On the performance end, Quantum has definitely delivered.  Performance is greater than that of the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Vantage hard drive, and even beats the 10,000 RPM Atlas 10K in most tests.  This can be attributed to a couple things.  First off, the great areal density of the disks results in quicker access times and great data transfer rates because the data is packed closer together.  Pair that up with a 4MB cache, and you have one fast hard drive. It's amazing to see a 7200 RPM drive perform so quickly.

Since this drive runs at 7200 RPM, active cooling is not required in most cases.  In our medium tower case, the drive ran warm to the touch and was comparable to a 7200 ATA66 drive.  Unless, your case is extremely cramped and has very little cooling, then you should not have to worry about heat problems. 

Next Page: Ratings and Conclusion