Quantum Fireball 26GB HDD
Review
A hard disk is a hard disk, right? Well not
anymore. The variety of drives on the market can give us a hard time in deciding
which one is most suitable for our needs. We are now starting to see hard disk
drives going into 15,000rpm rotational speeds and reaching never before achieved
storage capacities. Growth in hard disk capacities will continue to expand at
phenomenal rates into the future. Most of us will never have the utilization for
sizes of 26GB and beyond.
While this area of technology continues to grow,
the problem now stands at exploiting the available bandwidth current interfaces today offer.
Most drives today on the ATA interface seldom perform at 66MB/sec, the maximum transfer
rate of ATA/66. Recently, ATA/100 controller cards have hit the market and it will certainly be
a while before drive technology even reaches the limits of ATA/66
let alone ATA/100. This of course raises the question of whether or not
drive interface technology is growing too fast or is hard drive technology itself moving too
slow?
Whatever the answer may be, it is a fact that
consumers expect to see hard drive transfer rates keep up with available
interfaces regardless of the fact that hard disk manufacturing technology isn't
yet able to perform up to these demands. This certainly puts a lot of pressure on
manufacturers and has been the focus of debate on many a website.
There doesn't seem to be any amount of complaining on our
parts that can change the current scenario. So while manufacturers are aware of
this, companies such as Quantum have added a number of other features to their
drives such as SPS, SPS II, DPS and the latest technology to exit their labs
which allows their drives to operate at a whisper-quiet level. The
implementation of this technology, called Quiet Drive Technology, is evident in
their lct line of hard disk drives.
Touted as the
"quietest drive in the world", Quantum has successfully shifted the focus from
performance to features. So how useful is this quiet-drive technology. Well,
give it a thought. First of all, focus on all of the components inside that
great space of a cabinet of yours. The cabinet fan, CPU fan, additional coolers,
hard disk drive, CD-ROM drive and others are capable of giving off a good
overall amount of noise. Quantum has done its part in reducing the overall noise
of the cabinet by keeping the noise level of the hard disk to a minimum. Does it
really work? How quiet is the drive? Read on to find out more...
Reviewed
here is the Quantum Fireball lct08 26.0GB hard disk drive. Let us
now move on to the
specifications.
Specifications
- 26.0GB capacity
- 8.9 millisecond overall access
time
- 5,400 rpm rotational speed
- Rotational latency of 5.56ms
-
257Mbits/sec maximum internal transfer rate
- 512KB buffer with 418KB Advance
Cache Management (ACM)
- Features Quiet Drive Technology (QDT)
-
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 II (SPS II) to reduce
handling induced failures
- Data Protection System (DPS) to verify drive
integrity
- Downloaded Firmware.
- 4" x 1" x 5.75"
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