The usual configuration for putting hard drives to the test has put used in this review of the Quantum lct08 as well. Here are the details...

- Celeron 400MHz CPU (66MHz FSB)
- Azza PT-810DMC Motherboard (Intel 810-chipset with integrated ATA/66 support)
- Integrated ATA/66 controller
- 40-pin, 80 conductor ATA/66 compliant cable
- 96MB PC100 SDRAM (CAS 2)

- 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 NT 4.0 / Windows 98

Ziff Davis' Winbench 99 was used to test the disk subsystem performance of the Quantum Fireball lct08. 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 word processing, 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.

Before testing, the hard disk was divided into 3 partitions. One partition, FAT-16, was restricted to a size of 2GB due to the limited amount of space available under each partition of FAT-16. The second was a 12GB partition of FAT-32 and the third was of course a 12GB partition of NTFS. Fresh installations of Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 were used in a dual-boot configuration with a minimal amount of drivers and applications installed.