Specifications

Reviewed here is the Quantum Fireball CR 8.4GB. The CR line of hard disks are cousins of the CX line. The difference mainly rests in the internal transfer rates of the drives. For the CR line, the maximum internal transfer rate is 194Mbits/sec and the internal transfer rate for the CX is 241.9Mbits/sec max. Furthermore here is a list of features exhibited by the Fireball CX.

- 8.4 GB capacity
- Low profile, 1-inch height
- Average seek time of 9.5ms
- Rotational latency of 5.56ms
- 194Mbits/sec maximum internal transfer rate
- 512KB buffer with 418KB Advance Cache Management (ACM)
- Quadruple-burst ECC and double burst ECC on the fly
- 625,000 hours MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure)
- S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) enabled
- Shock Protection System (SPS) to reduce handling induced failures
- Data Protection System (DPS) to verify drive integrity
- Downloadable firmware
- 4" x 1" x 5.75"

Test Bed Setup

In order to put the Quantum CR 8.4GB to the test, the following hardware/software platform was used.

- Celeron 400MHz CPU (66MHz FSB)
- Azza PT-810DMC Motherboard (810 chipset with in-built ATA/66 support)
- 96MB 100MHz SDRAM (CAS-2)
- 40-pin, 80-conduction ATA/66 compliant cable

- Ziff Davis' Winbench 99 version 1.1 under Windows NT 4.0 / Windows 98
- Adaptec's Threadmark 2.0 under Windows NT 4.0 / Windows 98
- SiSoft Sandra 99 under Windows 98

- Lots of time!

Ziff Davis' Winbench 99 was used to test the disk subsystem performance of the Quantum Fireball CX. Under this, 2 tests were used that belong to this suite. The Business Disk Winmark and the High-end Disk Winmark. To begin with, the Business Disk Winmark test hard drive subsystem performance under common business applications such as wordprocessing, spreadsheet, databases, etc. The High-end Disk Winmark benchmarks a drive through a given series of tests under applications such as the likes of Microsoft's Frontpage, Adobe Premiere and Visual C++ among others. Let us get on to the numbers. Adaptec's Threadmark 2.0 measures multithreaded disk I/O performance under Windows NT and Windows 98. Threadmark also computes the CPU overhead required to perform these disk data transfers. The significance of CPU overhead indicates how much the CPU is involved in the process of transferring data. A lower number is better since the CPU has more time to handle other processes while the data transfers are occuring.