Two of the most popular bargain IDE drives selling right now are the Maxtor Diamond Plus 20 gig ($199 at CompUSA) and the Quantum CX 20 gig ($219 at Outpost). But the Maxtor runs at 7200 rpm and the Quantum runs only at 5400 rpm. Does that mean it's slower?  

 

Conclusion:
There's seems to be no significant difference in the speed of these two drives, especially in the "real world" DUPLICATE tests. And one avid disk drive technology observer suggested that the 5400 rpm drive would be more reliable. All things being equal, I'll vote for data integrity.

I admit a more fair test would be to test two drives from the same manufacturer with identical specs other than spindle speed. If that opportunity presents itself, I'll retest. It may be difficult, however to find such a scenario. And drive manufacturers haven't been too cooperative with eval units lately.

Test Configurations & Procedures

• All tests were run on a G4/400 with disk cache set to 512K (to minimize effects of caching). Both drives were slaved, formatted with Apple's Drive Setup 1.7.3, and empty of all files except those used for testing.
• For the DUPLICATE FOLDER test, I copied the 45MB Unreal game folder containing 53 documents onto each drive. Then I used a stopwatch to time how long it took to duplicate it on the same drive. Finally I calculated megabytes per second by with the formula: folder size * 2 / seconds.
• For the DUPLICATE SINGLE DOC test, I copied a 27MB Photoshop file onto each drive. Then I used a stopwatch to time how long it took to duplicate it on the same drive. Finally I calculated megabytes per second by with the formula: folder size * 2 / seconds.
• The SUSTAINED READ/WRITE test was done with Hard Disk Tool Kit 3.0. I changed the iterations to 30 and upped the read/write block size to 5000K.

A big MAHALO to...

...Outpost for the use of the Quantum drive

...CompUSA for the use of the Maxtor drive