🚀 go-pugleaf

>      Has anyone ('Net, magazine, etc.) done a comparison of 2.1-gig AV
>drives -- Micropolis 4221 AV, Seagate Barracuda, Quantum?

We've evaluated all these drives for use with the Otari RADAR hard disk 
recorder (which we develop) and would rank them as follows:

	1)	Seagate Barracuda
	2)	Micropolis 4221 AV
	3)	Quantum (Grand Prix was better than Atlas)

Seagate wins by a nose over Micropolis because the drive has been shipping for 
a longer period and has had more firmware bugs worked out (make sure you order 
your 'Cuda 2 with rev 0016 firmware or higher!)  We've been using the Cuda2 
since about January, and its pretty good (now that the firmware is stable!).

We've just started evaluating the Micropolis a month ago, and it looks to be 
as good and as fast as the Seagate, but it's still pretty early to tell for 
sure.

My experience with Quantum is more limited.  I eval'ed a Grand Prix a while 
back, and it was slightly slower than the Seagate, but it was a pretty early 
unit, so a lot could have changed now that it is in full production.  The 
Atlas series (which Quantum acquired from DEC) was the worst of the lot, but 
the eval unit we got was practically wire wrapped.

All these drives are 7200 RPM disks and can be pretty noisy.  I don't think 
you will want an array of these drives in the studio itself without a sound 
enclosure.  Hope this is helpful!

Doug Schmidt   Creation Technologies Inc.    Phone: 604-430-4336
doug@creation.portal.ca   BBS: 604-430-4376    Fax: 604-430-4337