World's Fastest Disk Drive

Seagate's new Cheetah UltraSCSI hard disk is the first to hit 10,000 rpm.

Stan Miastkowski

Demanding PC applications too often run up against hard disks that can't push data fast enough. Seagate Technology has changed that picture with its introduction of the Cheetah line of disk drives. They're the first to bump the standard for high-performance hard drives from 7200 rpm to 10,000 rpm.

I tested an UltraSCSI Cheetah on a 133-MHz Pentium system using an Adaptec AHA-3940UW SCSI card. The results were impressive. The Cheetah was able to transfer data at a continuous rate of nearly 11 MB per second. That's more than enough for the most demanding use. And the Cheetah's embedded-servo technology means the drive doesn't need to perform periodic recalibration that slows down data transfer. This is particularly important for video applications, where even the smallest data interruptions mean dropped frames.

It's not difficult to see why the Cheetahs offer better performance ; the faster a drive spins, the quicker it delivers data. The faster rpm rate also means the drive finds data faster. I measured the unit's average access at 5.8 milliseconds. But it's the Cheetah's latency figure (which measures the average time to access the next data called for) that's really impressive. Seagate claims 2.99-ms latency, by far the fastest of any drive available today. By contrast, average latency on high-performance 7200-rpm drives is about 4.2 ms. These seemingly small differences become important when you're pushing a drive to its limits.

When first turned on, the Cheetah sounds like a distant jet engine spooling up. But because of special sound-absorbing and sonic-damping materials, the drive soon settles down to a sound level that's little different from other high-end drives. The Cheetah does, however, get very hot after it's been running for a while. You'd be wise to follow the airflow specifications in the manual. Seagate's stated mean time between failures (MTBF), by the way, is 1,000,000 hours -- 114 years.

The Cheetah uses magneto-resistive heads to pack the data, a 512-KB buffer, and partial-response, maximum likelihood (PRML) read channels that separate that tightly packed data from electronic noise. The drives are compliant with SCSI Configuration Automatically (SCAM) and with Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART), so they should be easy to install and maintain.

The Cheetah comes in 4.5-GB and 9.1-GB models, in both UltraSCSI and Fibre Channel versions. Other major manufacturers will no doubt follow suit and introduce 10,000-rpm drives, but for now, Seagate is the one to buy if you want state-of-the-art hard disk storage.

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Product Information

Cheetah ST34501........................price not yet available

 (4.5 or 9.1 GB; UltraSCSI or 
  Fibre Channel)
Seagate Technology
Scotts Valley, CA
Phone:    (800) 732-4283 or (408) 438-8111
Fax:      (408) 438-2620
Internet: 
http://www.seagate.com

Circle 1108 on Inquiry Card.

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Speed Rules

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Cheetah Spearheads the Revolutions

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More revolutions per minute drives the Cheetah's latency down to a ridiculously low 2.99 milliseconds.

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Stan Miastkowski is a BYTE consulting editor who has been poking around inside computers for almost two decades. You can reach him at stanm@bix.com .