We are getting ready to buy some Quadra 700s, and we want the fastest
possible internal hard disk. We're getting a LOT of conflicting
information from vendors. What really opened our eyes was a loaner Q950
from Apple with their 400MB drive. The SCSI probe says this is a Seagate
mechanism. It blows away our Q700 with a Quantum 240 hard disk. Load times of typical applications on the Q950 are ONE-THIRD the times of our Q700 with a Quantum 240. Applications literally explode onto the screen.
Yet Quantum technical support says that their 240 and 425MB drives are
both SCSI-2 drives rated at 2.8 MB/s on the bus. (Watch out- there's head
to buffer peak performance rated at perhaps 10 MB/s, and there's bus
throughput - which depends on the controller.) Anyway, the specs on this
Apple 400 MB drive are 15 ms ave seek and 1.2 MB/s transfer rate. This is
well below the the Quantum claims, yet it is substantially faster loading
applications - at least on the Q950.
o Can this be attributed to the Q950 bus hardware compared to the Q700?
(The 33 MHz 040, to the extent that it plays a role in moderating the loading of applications from the disk, does not account for this factor of 3 we see in
application launch times.)
o Has anyone actually tested 3rd party drives in the 400-600 MB class that
equal the performance of Apple's 400 MB?
o Has anyone seen substantially different hard disk performance with
identical drives in a Q700 and a Q950 or Q900?
So far, even Apple has not been much help. If there is enlightening
individual e-mail feedback, I'll post. But this might be a good topic to
