The Test Drives: Maxtor Atlas 15K And WD Raptor

Too large, too slow: The hard drives from Seagate (ST3146807LW) held up our tests because of their large capacity of 146 GB. This situation prompted us to switch without delay to models running at 15,000 rpm (see below).

Initially we used ten Seagate drives with 10,000 rpm and 146 GB capacity (ST3146807LW) for our tests. We decided, however, to exchange these for faster and smaller drives. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, we wanted to ascertain maximum performance. Secondly, tests with arrays in the order of many hundreds of Gigabytes take many hours. We won't be returning to the subject of the initialization required beforehand. The choice fell to the Maxtor Atlas 15K with 18 GB after we were able to get hold of them at short notice.

For the test, we used eight current SCSI hard drives from Maxtor with 15,000 rpm, the Atlas 15K model.