| Quantum Fireball Plus KX
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Not long ago COMBATSIM.COM™ reviewed the Western Digital Expert ATA 66 drive. With ATA 66 now supported on the new mainboards, purchasing a new hard drive means a choice between one of the new generation of UDMA drives. The new Fireball Plus KX drives run at 7200RPM and support the Ultra ATA/66 interface. I recently installed the 27 GB Fireball Plus KX drive and put it through its paces. Specifications
The Fireball Plus KX supports ATA-66 and is backwards compatible with older EIDE/ATA interfaces. This means that you can use the drive in an older system and then benefit by the new standard when you upgrade. Quantum also has a new Data Protection System (DPS). Apparently more than 40 percent of hard drives returned by customers show no failure when tested. As a result, Quantum needed to develop an easy method for PC users to determine whether their hard drive is the source of a system failure. If you're having problems with your system, you can use Quantum's DPS to check your hard disk to make sure it's working properly. Quantum drives also designed a new Shock Protection System although hard drives have been all but indestructible for a few years now. UDMA 66 and UDMA 33 The "33" and "66" numbers indicate the maximum transfer rate. DMA-33 supports a 33.3MB/s maximum transfer rate and DMA-66 supports a 66.6MB/s maximum transfer rate. Are DMA-66 drives twice as fast as DMA-33 drives? No. But then, the sustained transfer rate of UDMA 33 drives is also much lower than 33MB/s. The real question is this: how much faster than ATA 33 are the ATA 66 drives? Installing the Fireball Plus KX was a cinch. I simply connected the drive to my mainboard and then booted WIN98 from a floppy. I formated the hard disk and installed WIN98, then followed the adapter instructions and loaded the Highpoint drivers from the BE-6 installation CD. Voila!
 WIN98 Release 2 identified the drive under the "SCSI controllers" section of Device Manager. After installing the new drivers, Windows listed a "HPT 366 Ultra DMA Controller." |
 ATA-66 Test System and Performance
 As you can see, UDMA-66 does outperform UDMA-33. Quantum's Fireball Plus KX outperforms the older 5400RPM Western Digital drive in the benchmarks. Falcon 4 loaded about 35% faster using this drive than with a Western Digital drive running ATA 33 at 5400 RPM. The ATA 66 WD Expert, like the Fireball, was a 7200 RPM drive but with a whopping 2 MB buffer! CPU utilization was up just slightly running the Quantum under ATA 66 vs ATA 33, from 1.9% to 2.3%. I've also found the new Fireball a bit more noisy than the Western Digital drive, but the additional performance is worth it. (Note also that there was a recent recall on some WD drives!) Noise really isn't an issue... when I am running any of my favorite games my sound system is drowning out any peripheral noises. ATA66 performance improvement in most gaming applications won't be noticed, but the 7200 RPM spindle speed does have some impact. Total loading time for Falcon 4.0, for example, dropped by almost 30% compared to the Western Digital 5400 RPM drive. With processor speeds now exceeding 750 MHz, and especially with the horsepower of the AMD CPUs, you need a big pipe to feed data. Furthermore, if you happen to be loading up multiple CD games like Flight Sim 2000 or Flight Unlimited III, space quickly becomes a premium. The new 27 GB Fireball Plus KX is just the ticket. Quantum has released another excellent hard drive. Join a discussion forum on this article by clicking HERE.
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