I had good experiences with Seagate SCSI drives so I was hoping the new Seagate Barracuda 20 gig ATA/66 (ST320430A) drive as screamer. It was selling for $199 at Outpost.Com (free shipping). In this latest iteration of testing, I included the new IBM DeskStar 34GXP 20 gig which comes highly recommended and is selling for $199 at Egghead.
LONGER BAR is FASTER. RED BAR IS FASTEST.
Conclusion
The
Seagate
Barracuda 20 gig ATA/66
(ST320430A) is still the fastest Ultra-ATA/66 I've tested to date.
It really screams, even though the Yikes has an ATA/33 interface.
It's even faster than the Western Digital Expert 20 gig ATA/66
running on the G4/450 Sawtooth with its ATA/66 interface. (This
would imply that the drives, not the interface, are the limiting
factor in speed.)
Other
Comments
A
warning to those of you buying a G4 minitower with the 10 gig low
end drive: If it's
the WDC Caviar, it goes almost as fast as the "big dogs" (up to
19MB/sec sustained.) However, Apple also ships machines with the
Quantum Fireball CX 10 gig. When I tested that drive, it could
only muster 11MB/sec. I pity anyone who ordered a Yikes or
Sawtooth and got that drive.
FireWire drives are two to three times more costly than internal IDE drives yet they aren't as fast as the Barracuda and others. Maybe with further driver and controller refinements, they can match or exceed the conventional drives and further justify the added cost for the convenience of external hot-swap-ability.
Test Configurations & Procedures