Looking at the bottom of the drive there are significant differences
- the electronics driving the newest version of this 6.4 Gb drive are
completly new and up to date. Not only that but the memory has
even been upgraded to what looks like an 16Mb 10ns/100MHz OKi RAM module - replacing an outdated
60ns 16Mb EDO RAM module by Hyundai.
 |
 |
|
RAM used on the "MPE" |
RAM used on the
"MPB" |
|
|
|
|
Newer Fujitsu "MPE"
6.4 Gb hard
drive |
Old Fujitsu "MPB"
6.4 Gb hard
drive |
Essentially all these upgrades should transform into better performance, so we
tested the two drives against each other with Sisoft Sandra Pro.
| DRIVES: |
4.3GB Maxtor |
6.3GB MPB |
6.3GBb MPE |
| Sandra
Benchmark |
5960 |
5019 |
9846 |
|
Min. Disk
Cache |
16 Mb |
16 Mb |
16 Mb |
|
Buffered Read |
210 Mb/s |
161 Mb/s |
110 Mb/s |
|
Sequencial
Read |
8 Mb/s |
6 Mb/s |
13 Mb/s |
|
Random Read |
4082 Kb/s |
3267 Kb/s |
6 Mb/s |
|
Buffered
Write |
136 Mb/s |
152 Mb/s |
105 Mb/s |
|
Sequencial
Write |
2338 Kb/s |
3788 Mb/s |
6 Mb/s |
|
Random Write |
2924 Kb/s |
5 Mb/s |
6 Mb/s |
|
Avg. Acces
Time |
8 ms |
10 ms |
5 ms |
|
DMA Emabled |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
The results show that with the new upgrades in electronics and memory, the
new version of Fujitsu's 6.4Gb smokes its earlier incarnation by almost 2:1.
What does all this mean? Well if you are in the market to put a system together
for the least amount of money, and don't require a huge 10+ Gig hard drive, a
"small" 6 Gig'r like this one can make a great choice.
It also breaks a myth that I held about 'old tech'. When most people discuss
'low capacity' drives they assume that what is available now is what was
available then, which is obviously not the case for Fujitsu. They have
managed to produce a small capacity drive inline with the larger drives of
today in performance. Bottom line, if you don't need 10+ Gb of
storage, you don't need to buy it, old tech is new tech and the
performance is excellent. That and the stainless steel looks really
nice...
