Introduction

It's all about the speed

Having trouble deciding what kind of hard disk to buy? Are 7200RPM drives worth the extra cost, or should I stick with a 5400RPM drive? When people decide on what parts to put in their system, they tend to overlook the hard drive. Often, people group the hard disk with the floppy drive, cd-rom, and keyboard: components they have to buy, but spend the least time researching. Many just pick the disk size, and look for the cheapest price on pricewatch. Don't make this mistake.

The hard disk has a drastic impact on how fast your system feels. The quality of the hard disk won't affect your game framerates, but it will affect your program load times. Do you ever wonder why Windows takes so much time to load? Yes, the size of the bloated OS is partially to blame, but a fast hard disk can shorten the Windows load time considerably. In Q3test, are you tired of being the last one to join a game when the server changes maps? Upgrade to 7200RPM, and you might actually get a fair shot at the armor and weapons.

How fast is it?

All the current top of the line EIDE drives run at 7200RPM, but 5400RPM drives are still standard. Now that new motherboards such as the Abit BE6 support ATA-66, we wanted to review an ATA-66 hard disk to show our readers if the performance gain is worth the money. Quantum, known primarily for their damn fast™ SCSI drives and pretty good™ EIDE drives, has released another series of pretty good™ EIDE drives. Their Fireball Plus KA drives all run at 7200RPM and support the Ultra ATA/66 interface. We managed to get our grubby little hands on a 6.4GB version and put it through a couple of WinBench and Threadmark tests. We'll tell you how ATA-33 stacks up against ATA-66, and how 7200RPM compares to 5400RPM.