Lastly, I ran HD Tach 2.61 under WinMe. I don't yet have the cash to get the registered version so it only shows read times and won't run under Windows 2000. Hopefully I'll get the full version in a few months.
The results here were
basically identical to those in the transfer rate chart provided by WinBench,
which I'm not going to put in here, since this one is much prettier and provides
more data. The beginning and end transfer rate numbers are a little lower than
those in the other benchmarks, and I can't really say why. Perhaps HD Tach just
goes about running the benchmark in a different, more conservative way.
Likewise, HD Tach reports the random access time as 12ms, which is significantly higher than the 7ms number quoted by Sandra. Again, HD Tach might just use a more rigorous testing method.
For reliability testing, I ran Intel's IOMeter under FAT32 for 8 straight hours at 50% read/50% write as a sort of torture test. Not surprisingly, there were no errors found. Chalk up another point for Quantum reliability. I didn't run into any other problems with the drive either.