I received a JTS Champion 3 Gig drive in the mail yesterday.
It was from Tiger Software, and they had a special price of $199 ( it
was $207 with shipping). This still seems like a really cheap price,
even for a special.
The drive came with no documentation, so it was an OEM
version. It did have a sticker on the drive that told how to set the
jumpers for Master/Slave configuration, though. Anyway, I stuck the
sucker in, and my Pentium motherboard BIOS had no trouble recognizing
it. I did the standard fdisk partitioning and standard format
(partitioned it into two 1.5 Gig sections).
I thought the encapsulation on the drive was cool. I always
worry about touching the back of the drives or slipping with a
screwdriver, etc. The drive is about 6-10 dB or so quieter than my
Western Digital Caviar 340 meg drive. When I put the case back on my
tower computer, I can barely hear the drive operating.
It seemed to work just fine. I copied about 500 megs of files
onto it, with no problems. I then ran the Norton Sysinfo hard drive
benchmark. Here are the numbers, vs my WD340 drive:
Drive avg seek(ms) xfer rate(kb/sec)
JTS 3.0 Gb 10.48 2012.2
WD 340 Mb 11.90 1422.9
So, it was a bit faster than my old Western Digital, which I
would expect. I guess its PIO mode 4, and my old WD drive might be
PIO mode 3, but I'm not sure. One thing I couldn't test was
sustained data transfer rates for the embedded servo/ AV portion of
the drive. Does anyone know of a benchmark that would test sustained
transfer rate? |
