🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <cart-2610951329360001@pm037-09.dialip.mich.net> cart@umich.edu (c art) writes:

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

Check out:

http://www.macromedia.com/Brain/New.media/Articles/Digitalvideo.html

for a review of various drives for digital video.

		Leonard

>      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

In article <46qude$sfo@wolfe.wimsey.com>, Doug Schmidt <dougs@portal.ca> wrote:
>>      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.

Is that the one that's actually the mechanism from the 3243, because 
their older "real" 2GB disk had so many early failures?  I like the 3243, 
but even with it I hear a lot of stories about sudden infant death 
syndrome from other people (who may well not know how they should be 
cooling their disk drives, really).

What kind of write throughput are you seeing on the 'Cuda (I assume it's 
a 2LP 32550, not the older model?)?  I have a weird problem with 
Barracudas, and 2LPs in particular: They read very fast, but I can only 
get about 1.7MB/sec onto them with long writes, through the NetBSD 
filesystem or even around it, directly to the raw device.  If you have a 
lot of them, perhaps you know if there might be some particular reason 
for this.

>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.

Is there a 2GB Grand Prix?  I was unaware of that.  I don't know about 
early units, and I know there were some firmware problems a few months ago,
but the 4GB Atlas drives I've tested run really, really cool and quiet, 
are extremely fast -- 9MB/sec! and don't show any evidence of mod wires,
unless they're hidden on the back of the board.  If you haven't tried one 
since they were in their infancy, you might want to give the Atlas 
another shot.

I have no experience with the 2GB Atlas, though I hear generally good 
things about it, and it's pretty cheap.  I might buy one for home.

>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!

Yeah, natch.  One or two, maybe.  Several, no.  It's like the vacuum pump 
for a really good turntable -- put it in the other room, or it'll make 
the sound worse instead of better. :-)

If you are going to use Micropolis drives, I highly recommend that you go 
with differential cabling.  The termination on the single-ended 3243s I 
have really sucks, to the extent that the documentation says to use "a 
cable-end active terminator" in internal configurations.  Where the hell 
do I get one of _those_? :-)

-- 
Thor Lancelot Simon                                               tls@cloud9.net
 
Don't let your mouth write no check that your tail can't cash.      --Bo Diddley

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

Hmmm... I got the Fujitsu 2943 4-gig drive for about $1,260.  It is a 
7200-rpm drive and about 9ms.  So far I'm very happy with it. -Tom

cart@umich.edu (c art) wrote:

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

>     The 250Mb hard drive that came with my 7100 is bulging -- time to upgrade.

>      Can immediately use a regular 2-gig drive to do graphics (Photoshop,
>Painter, etc.) but Master Plan is to get a 2-gig AV drive in anticipation
>of getting other stuff for a digital audio project in the next year. Have
>no need or desire to do video capture.

>      Dejanews has shown about the same number of posts swearing by and at
>these drives -- reliability and performance (at least from posters, not
>lurkers) seem similar to me. Would love to hear from anyone with
>definitive information.

>thank you 

>craig j

>email:   cart@umich.edu

>-- 
>craig j
>cart@umich.edu


Hey Craig, 

Don't know what you mean by "definitive information", but I can tell
you to begin with, that you can't go wrong with any of the vedors you
just named.  But if you want one of the newer drives, maybe an Ultra
SCSI 3, then here's some information that may help:

The Micropolis AV Gold series (which are standard Fast SCSI drives)
have been around for quite a while now-well not that long, but newer
drives (the Ultra SCSI 3's) have been made by Seagate, HP, IBM, and
Quantum that match or exceed its specs.  I think Micropolis is hard at
work on Fast-20 and Fast-40 drives now, but I don't know if anything
has hit yet.

If you are looking for an Ultra SCSI 3 drive (Fast 20) then, you'd
first need a Fast-20 SCSI adaptor (like an Adaptec 2940UW).  Two of
the best 2 GB Ultra SCSI drives are the Seagate Barracuda 4LP
(ST32171) and the Quantum Atlas II (XP32181).  Add "W" to the end of
the vendor part numbers if you need an Ultra Wide drive (40MB/sec).
These two drives are brand new and virtually identical in performance
specs.  I don't know of any other manufacturers that make drives that
can compare with either of these.

As for reliability, I haven't tried any of these out (in fact, I'm not
even 100% sure if they've hit the market yet!), but I've got one
friend who swears by the old Quantum Atlas and another who is in love
with his ST32550 fish (which he got when it first came out).

>If you are looking for an Ultra SCSI 3 drive (Fast 20) then, you'd
>first need a Fast-20 SCSI adaptor (like an Adaptec 2940UW).  Two of
>the best 2 GB Ultra SCSI drives are the Seagate Barracuda 4LP
>(ST32171) and the Quantum Atlas II (XP32181).  Add "W" to the end of
>the vendor part numbers if you need an Ultra Wide drive (40MB/sec).

These numbers that you mentioned (20MB/Sec and 40MB/sec) are not
sustained-throughput rates, I just wondered whether you were aware
of that.  They are probably burst-mode rates, or perhaps they are
the maximum capability of the bus.  Some manufacturers like Seagate
do not like to tell you what their sustained throughput numbers are,
they would rather mention burst-mode numbers because they sound more
impressive.  Micropolis are at least honest enough to tell you what
their real sustained throughput rates are.  Be aware that these 
drives will not be capable of sustained throughput *anywhere near* 
those numbers.  The sustained throughput will probably be somewhere 
between 5MB/sec and 10MB/sec.

In <475nuh$45n@noc.tor.hookup.net>, Richard Whitehouse <cvanderb@toronto.cbc.ca> writes:
>>If you are looking for an Ultra SCSI 3 drive (Fast 20) then, you'd
>>first need a Fast-20 SCSI adaptor (like an Adaptec 2940UW).  Two of
>>the best 2 GB Ultra SCSI drives are the Seagate Barracuda 4LP
>>(ST32171) and the Quantum Atlas II (XP32181).  Add "W" to the end of
>>the vendor part numbers if you need an Ultra Wide drive (40MB/sec).
>
>These numbers that you mentioned (20MB/Sec and 40MB/sec) are not
>sustained-throughput rates, I just wondered whether you were aware
>of that.  They are probably burst-mode rates, or perhaps they are
>the maximum capability of the bus.  Some manufacturers like Seagate
>do not like to tell you what their sustained throughput numbers are,
>they would rather mention burst-mode numbers because they sound more
>impressive.  Micropolis are at least honest enough to tell you what
>their real sustained throughput rates are.  Be aware that these 
>drives will not be capable of sustained throughput *anywhere near* 
>those numbers.  The sustained throughput will probably be somewhere 
>between 5MB/sec and 10MB/sec.
>
Check out www.macromedia.com/Brain/New.media/Articles/Digitalvideo.html
for a thorough review of the latest A/V drives.   Me, the fact that I
work on these things probably qualifies my opinion as biased, but I like
our (IBM) drives.


Mark Schultz [mschultz@watson.ibm.com] or [mds@henry.ece.cmu.edu]                                                                             
Guitar, Sound Engineering, Ultimate, SFB, Corvettes, Magnetics, and The Lord
Jesus Christ.  NOT in that order.  This .SIG subject to change at any time.

In article <475nuh$45n@noc.tor.hookup.net>, Richard Whitehouse
<cvanderb@toronto.cbc.ca> wrote:

> >If you are looking for an Ultra SCSI 3 drive (Fast 20) then, you'd
> >first need a Fast-20 SCSI adaptor (like an Adaptec 2940UW).  Two of
> >the best 2 GB Ultra SCSI drives are the Seagate Barracuda 4LP
> >(ST32171) and the Quantum Atlas II (XP32181).  Add "W" to the end of
> >the vendor part numbers if you need an Ultra Wide drive (40MB/sec).
> 
> These numbers that you mentioned (20MB/Sec and 40MB/sec) are not
> sustained-throughput rates, I just wondered whether you were aware
> of that.  They are probably burst-mode rates, or perhaps they are
> the maximum capability of the bus.  Some manufacturers like Seagate
> do not like to tell you what their sustained throughput numbers are,
> they would rather mention burst-mode numbers because they sound more
> impressive.  Micropolis are at least honest enough to tell you what
> their real sustained throughput rates are.  Be aware that these 
> drives will not be capable of sustained throughput *anywhere near* 
> those numbers.  The sustained throughput will probably be somewhere 
> between 5MB/sec and 10MB/sec.

You're correct the 20 and 40 Mbyte/sec numbers are burst rates
for Fast-20 Narrow and Wide, respectively.

The sustained performance is no mystery.  Just look at the
'Cuda 4LP's specs <http://www.seagate.com/sales/cuda/cuda4lp.html>
where it states (on the first line no less) that the data rate 
ranges from 75-120 Mbits/sec.  That roughly translates to 7-12 MBytes/sec,
sustained.

CP

cpruett@ionet.net (Chris Pruett) writes:

>The sustained performance is no mystery.  Just look at the
>'Cuda 4LP's specs <http://www.seagate.com/sales/cuda/cuda4lp.html>
>where it states (on the first line no less) that the data rate 
>ranges from 75-120 Mbits/sec.  That roughly translates to 7-12 MBytes/sec,
>sustained.

Oh, if it were only that simple.  That Mb/sec number is probably raw platter
rate.  Do you know what physical coding scheme they are using?  How much 
header, gap, ECC, etc.?  A typical number used to be 40% overhead, but may
be much better now.  I wouldn't expect 7-12MB/sec.  OTOH, my old 12550N on an
Alpha used to hold down 5-7MB/sec for quite some time.

Cheers,
David