Fujitsu's MAM3184MP With Ultra160 and 15,000

CougTek

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Used HDTach.

Proclaim the Fujitsu "the fastest drive available" but only tested it against another 10K SCSI and a bunch of ATA drives. No signs of the X15-36LP in the graphs.

Made mistakes like :
It bears mentioning that the drive is 1 inch in height, which has been standard for many years now. Particularly in the high-end section, there are still some drives that require 1.5" drive bays and thus require two conventional drive bays.
While any half-ass knows a half-heigh drive is 1.6" high and not 1.5".

Showed that they don't know how to measure noise level by declaring the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 2dB(A) noisier than the 10K rpm Fujitsu : totally ridiculous.

At that point, I pretty much stop paying attention to what the reviewer had to say about the MAM and it reinforced my belief that SR is the only true Storage Aotority on the Net.
 

SYROB

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Also look at the measured seek times !!! Do these guys read what they write ???

SYROB
 

CougTek

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SYROB said:
Also look at the measured seek times !!! Do these guys read what they write ???
I only saw access times, not seek times (this page) and they aren't that different from those at SR. The access times measured at TH for the MAM are similar to the read access times at SR and most others are slightly lower (WD1200JB/Bar. ATA IV) or slightly higher (MAN). This isn't the biggest flaw of the review IMO.
 

CougTek

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SR measured 12.3ms average read access time for that same drive so I guess the answer is : yes. Check in the database.
 

SYROB

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But the graph says less than 6.0 for the GXP !!


SYROB
 

CougTek

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We apparently don't see the same graph. I see 5.9 for the MAM and 12.6 for the 60GXP. Maybe it's my eyes, but I would swear...
 

CougTek

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I just thought about something. Maybe TH made a mistake in the graph the first time you saw the review. They have now corrected it but you don't see the corrected graph since the graph loads from your browser's cache. Clear your browser's cache and revisit the page.
 

SYROB

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They just corrected it,

Just refreshed the browser and the new data is now up..

They had everythig backwards as far as time goes

SYROB
 

SYROB

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I tried to post the BMP I captured but do not know how to post a bitmap

SYROB
 

Tea

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SYROB said:
They had everythig backwards as far as time goes
Funny you should say that at this particular moment, Syrob. :)

For some reason I've always been a bit leery of Fujitsu drives, expect them to under-perform in real life use. I guess it's because of all those ultra-quiet but sluggish IDE things they made in 2GB to 10GB days.

(Actually, I shouldn't say "always" - Fujitsu's SCSI drives in the 500MB class were outstanding. I owned one for several years and loved it. Just aquired a couple of them again, though I don't exactly know what I'm going to do with a pair of 500MB SCSI drives. Tom's seem to think I should throw them away as they are 1.6 inches high! )

(Excuse ramble. I'm over-tired.)

But I must say that this new 15K Fujitsu looks really nice. Essentially a whisper-quiet X15. I'm a little tempted. And the pictures are nice. I always like it when a drive manufacturer makes a fast drive look fast.
 

CougTek

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SYROB said:
I tried to post the BMP I captured but do not know how to post a bitmap
Please don't post a BMP on this forum, it's too huge. Change it to a gif or png, but not a bmp. People on dial-up will hate you.

Tea said:
Essentially a whisper-quiet X15. I'm a little tempted. And the pictures are nice. I always like it when a drive manufacturer makes a fast drive look fast.
Ahh women! I suppose you also buy cars because of their color?
 

timwhit

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Tony, what about that first-gen Cheetah??? Have you got it looking good in the pictures yet?

AFAIK none of the Seagate drives look particularly fast from the outside. The coolest looking drive that I have seen recently was a WD 200BB that was both black and silver. Mickey's post over on SR got me thinking about how cool that drive looks. Tannin, you really need to get one of those for your site.
 

Tea

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I'd love one, Tim. But only siler BBs to be found over here.

As for the Cheetah, I'll just have to wait until it fails, if I live that long, and can take the top off. The inside of drives is almost always worth looking at. Right now it's back in harness, buried deep inside our technical server, running 24/7 365 days a year, as it always has ever since I bought it five years ago.
 

timwhit

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If I ever see one again I will swipe it and take a few picture for you. I'm sure the pictures won't be nearly as high quality as your outdoor shots. But it's better than nothing.

I'll be back working as a tech this summer and I should have a chance to lay my hands on one. (the real summer, not that weird oz summer)
 

Tea

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Sorry, Tannin. Silver BBs.

But what about the Mark 1 X15? They look wonderful.

Hmmm .... A short list of the best-looking drives ever made. (Just off the top of my head, subject to revision.) (Not in any order.)

Seagate Medalist Pro ST-51080A, and its various relatives
Seagate Decathlon series
IBM Deskstar XP
Western Digital Expert & its IBM twin were ptetty good.
Maxtor 7213 (Not the black one pictured on my site, the later silver one.)
Miniscribe 8051A
NEC D5126
Miniscribe 3053
IBM WD-12
Fujitsu M2611
Lapine Titan 3532
Quantum EX and CX were not bad
Fujitsi SCSI drives from the early Nineties were nice too
 

Tannin

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That would be nice, Tim. Thankyou. Hmmm.... Maybe I should give you a "most wanted" list?

(Don't push your luck, Tannin.)

(It never hurts to ask, Tea.)

Hmmm, no need for a list anyway: the missing pictures make themselves obvious. Biggest gap is a Miniscribe 3650, dreadful things that they were.

It has been a weird Oz summer this year: didn't start till Febuary, was over before March. An absoluetly brilliant autumn though.
 

timwhit

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I doubt that I will ever see anything like that. But if there are any recent IDE drives that you need pictures of, I run into most of them working on the crappy computers people bring in.
 

time

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Tannin said:
It has been a weird Oz summer this year: didn't start till Febuary, was over before March. An absoluetly brilliant autumn though.
Bloody Victorians. Just wait until July, then we'll see who's got absoluetly (sic) brilliant weather.

For those not in the better hemisphere, Brisbane's summer starts about September and finishes in April. There's a brief Autumn in May and June and an even briefer Spring in August. Oh yes, and winter lasts from July 1 to July 31.
 

timwhit

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Tannin, since you're so old and wise you have to remember this one. :)

I worked on it about 2 years ago and then about a year ago again. I think it was the original Compaq portable computer. It had a small green CRT and a keyboard that clicked into the front to cover the CRT and the floppy drive. Anyways the HDD on it died and I had to take about 50 torx screws out of the thing just to get to the drive. I finally got a 'new' drive in it and restored the software. It ran DOS 3 if I remember correctly. It definitely took quite a bit of finagling to get that drive working in there, even though it was an old 200MB drive.

Then the damn thing came back a year later and the drive was dead again. Which didn't make me happy at all, and since I was the one who got it working the last time, I got to work on it again. Since we didn't have any more old 200MB drives I had to try to get a newer drive to work in it. I never did get it working with a bigger drive. I think it is still in the back waiting to be picked up, I have my doubts that the customer will ever come back again. (who wants to pay to get a 18 year old computer back that doesn't even work?)

Another customer brought in a really old computer that had one of those huge old drives that had two data connectors on it. I can't remember what the interface was called (I'm sure you can...). I decided it wasn't worth trying to get it to work with a new drive. But I did see it. I can't remember who made the drive though.

So you see I have seen some of the really old crappy hardware that you reminisce about so often. And of course VESA...everyone loves VESA.
 

Tannin

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Oh my God.

I thought I had forgotten about bloody Compaq bloody portables and their fifteen billion bloody torx screws, fifteen billion and one if you count the secret one that holds it all together and you can't find without consulting an oracle. (And no, I don't mean Larry Ellison, I mean the real thing, complete with ectoplasm.)

Old computers were nice to work on, Tim. Real ones, I mean. Compaq never made anything yet that could be classed as a "computer", just differently shaped piles of vomit. As you discovered for yourself.

The only practical way to get an old Comqcrap working is with a drive that is more or less the same as the original, if I recall the damn things. They don't even have a proper BIOS. I mean, they have to pay someone to take a perfectly good Phoenix BIOS and hack it about untill it is unusable. Pay extra.

(Hawk. Spit. DING!)

MFM. Indeed. Or possibly RLL, or (less likely still) EDSI.

Replacing them is easy. You just pop in an IDE controller and take out the MFM one. Then you send the MFM drive to me, because I love them.

VESA. Ahh yes. Many was the struggle I had with new-build VESA systems. But VESA was important. If it hadn't been for VESA we might all be running proprietary MCA machines now, and paying through the nose to IBM for every one of them. VESA, despite its unlovely form and suspect reliability, saved us all from an all-pervading market dominance by a pocket-robbing set of monopoly money-grubbers. RAMBUS is just a modern imitation of the same idea.

Do I miss VESA?

Not one little bit. :)
 

NRG = mc²

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Best looking drive... Barracuda IV, X15 (I don't think the 36LPs have a different design to the original... or do they?), Atlas 10K-II/III.

Worst looking? Certainly WD's old Caviar range. Big square brick. Accept only the finest: Caviar.

RIGHT!!
 

Mercutio

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Pradeep said:
Wasn't VESA just a poor mans EISA?

No.

VESA was a 32-bit extension to the 16-bit ISA spec clocked at the full speed of the system bus, unlike ISA or EISA. It was plug and play, at least in that there was very little additional hardware configuration needed, unlike ISA.

Theoretical transfer rates could actually exceed 32-bit 33MHz PCI since 486s operated at bus speeds up to 50MHz (there was an un-multipled 486DX/50). A normal VESA card could theorectically transfer data at 100MB/sec (for a 25MHz bus) or 133MB/sec (for the 33MHz 486s), same as PCI.

The interface was clunky, but backwards-compatible with ISA.

Intel killed VLB with the introduction of the Pentium 60. P60s and P66s - the only unmultiplied Pentium chips, also offered PCI (then called Pentium Component Interface), an equally-fast plug-and-play interface with a less clunky connector and a de-coupled clock based on the speed of the system bus.
Between the the electronics demanded in moving VLB up to 60 or 66MHz, and the physical expenses needed to make the larger VLB cards, and, well, the writing was on the wall, and even 486s started moving to PCI.
 
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