U320 SCSI HDD ROUNDUP

Maxtor Atlas 15K II

Maxtor was recently purchased by Seagate.  Its Atlas series of drives were among the fastest SCSI drives out there, but usually in the 10k RPM category only.  Below, we have the Atlas 15K II, their 2nd-generation 15K RPM SCSI drive:

Click on the logo above to view the Atlas 15K II webpage at the Maxtor website.

HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW, 8MB Zones: Burst: 244.1 MB/s, Ave. Read: 90.2 MB/s, Ave. Write: 61.0 MB/s, Random Access: 5.3 ms, CPU: 1%

HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW, 32MB Zones: Burst: 243.7 MB/s, Ave. Read: 89.4 MB/s, Ave. Write: 71.6 MB/s, Random Access: 5.3 ms, CPU: 1%

HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW, Variable Zones: Burst: 243.9 MB/s, Ave. Read: 89.0 MB/s, Ave. Write: 76.6 MB/s, Random Access: 5.5 ms, CPU: 1%

The ATTO benchmark of the Atlas 15K II is not very impressive.  Writes were very much behind the reads.

In the 2-drive RAID_0 test, the writes doubled in speed, while the reads increased by about 77%, not bad. 

And for the 2-drive RAID_1, we see very inconsistent reads.  Performance is similar to that of a single-drive.