I believe the bigfoot line has some serious drawbacks though. Isn't it a 5.25 " format, and I believe the seek time is like 15 ms. Its good for cheap slow secondary storage, but not great as a main drive.
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You've got to compare apples with apples....
David,
Form factor.... not an issue for me and not a performance factor.
Let's see. hummmm...... the specs in the Global catalog P31, say:
JTS Champion C3000-3AF AVG Seek time < 12ms
Quantum BF QM54335CY-A Avg Seek time < 14ms
At first glance, that would look to me like the seek time for the Champ is between 11 and 12ms and the seek time for the Big Foot is between 13 and 14ms. At first blush, one could look at those isolated numbers and do a comparison and say the Champ has a 17%-18% faster seek time, depending on which end of the range you're on. My, my.. that makes the Champ look like the performance winner...
But is it?
Let us take a closer look at the seek performance:
The average seek time of a harddrive is defined and spec'ed as the time required to have the head mechanism traverse 1/3 of the tracks on the disk surface.
To simplify the comparison, let's assume that both drives are single platter devices where all the tracks are under a single head.
The JTS drive will traverse 1GB worth of tracks (3GB/3) in 12ms or 83.33MB worth of tracks per ms.
The slow old Bigfoot drive will traverse 1.433GB worth of tracks (4.3GB/3) in 14ms or 102.38MB of tracks per ms.
(8-0 Uh-Oh!
It looks to me that, in a single platter environment, the slow old Big Foot covers more ground per ms than the swift Champion. Well, 102.38MB/83.33MB or 22% more ground per ms... to be exact. So, so BigFoot is faster and wins! Or does it?
I have not checked to find the real number of platters per drive for either device, but you can see that them apples get real tricky to compare, and the obvious answer sometime may not be the correct one.
However, it also depends on your system criteria factors in your purchase decision: cost/MB or ms/access or MB/ms or 5,25" vs 3.0" or whatever.
But, I don't spend my time just running benchmarks.
With a well sized disk cache, PCI EIDE busmastering and a file system that doesn't let files get fragmented, I don't see any perceptable penalty during my working day at my system. So, for me, it did come down to 'Is getting 1.3GB more storage worth $19?'.
Those were my apples to apples. :-)
Ben A |
