> A system's performance will depend on the operating system, the file
> allocation system (FAT, HPTS, FAT32, etc), the caching algorithms,
> the fragmentation level of the data on the drive, etc. AND probably
> most important of all is the way the actual subject program is using
> the DASD and the data contained on it.
While true, the only problem is that JTS makes only hard drives, and not drive optimization software or OS'es. I would think it is certainly valid to ask, "If I were to swap in a 4.3G JTS drive in place of a 4.3G Brand X drive and leave everything else the same, would the system be faster or slower?"
> Important questions relative to 'avg seek time' are:
> Do the drives have the same number of tracks per platter?
> How much data is contained on each track?
True again, but I think these other numbers are often similar for drives of similar capacity and form factors produced at the same time. I'll have to check on this to be sure though. If you look on the JTS and Quantum websites, there are reviews of drives which compare their speed to competing drives of a fraction of the capacity. Of course since the data/track and tracks/platter were lower for the smaller drives, just about any new drive would compare favorably.
Also, I should correct what I said earlier about the seek time for newest JTS drives being higher than for competing drives. This turns out to be true only in the case of the fastest competition (IBM, Fujitsu, Maxtor). It turns out that WD's and Seagate's newest UDMA drives (with the exception of the 6.4G seagate) have 11 or 12 ms seek times. Seagate is even selling one line with 4500RPM spindle. JTS cache is double to quadruple of these competitors. The MTBF for the WD and seagates (350,000 and 300,000) is considerably lower than for JTS (500,000). As far as I know, seek time, RPM and MTBF are all VERY REAL parameters, which actually determine/reflect how fast your system goes (of course given everything else remains the same) and how likely the drive is to fail within a given period of time.
JTS might still have a lot of problems, but I don't think the overall performance and quality of their product is one of them
--Scott |
