Well, you have already seen a lot of HDD reviews on our site this year. They covered many new models and gave you a more or less clear picture of the situation in the storage market. Now you may believe that no further investigation is necessary and that all the leaders have been already revealed. However, nevertheless, we decided to carry out one more large comparative testing.

If you didn't follow the events of the HDD market attentively enough, you might have missed some really important things. Here is a brief summary for your reference:

• Seagate launched the new U Series 6 and Barracuda ATA IV solutions;
• Western Digital played some tricks with the spindle rotation speeds (see this article for more info);
• IBM discontinued 40GV (DTLA 3050x0) family;
• Fujitsu announced their desire to leave the desktop hard disk drive market for a while;
• Quantum got completely absorbed by Maxtor;
• Samsung appeared the third to start dealing with 40GB platters.

As you may see, a lot of interesting things happened this year… Unfortunately, we haven't yet had the chance to get acquainted with Samsung hard disk drives, however, we are working on it, and will hopefully offer you something interesting in the near future. The hard disk drives from Fujitsu, however, are a totally different case. We have been waiting for a long time for the opportunity to get hold of the MPG AT-E and MPG AH-E HDDs with "proper" 20GB platters and 2MB cache-buffer. However, for some reason Fujitsu decided to puzzle everybody having launched HDDs with different cache-buffers within one and the same family, so that only 40GB HDDs could boast the maximum configuration…

This fact pushed us toward our decision to take hard disk drives with 40GB storage capacity. Besides, the prices on hard drives get lower and lower, so that even a 40GB is quite affordable currently.

Testing Participants

This comparison will cover 6 most popular hard disk drives. They are:

IBM Deskstar 60GXP: this is almost a veteran already, still standing bravely the competitors' attacks. (Review)

Western Digital Caviar WD400BB: this is also not a new model, but… Some time ago we found out that Western Digital started building it with 27GB platters (2 platters, 3 heads), so we decided to take another look at this solution.

Quantum Fireball Plus AS: strange as it might see, but these hard disk drives are still available in retail, so we can't help including this model in our roundup.

Fujitsu MPG3409AH-E: this is the so long awaited model with 20GB platters and Fluid Dynamic Bearings. Tom's Hardware tested this HDD a while ago and it proved a pretty fast solution then, as far as we remember.

Seagate Barracuda ATA III: this is also a very well-known HDD, but we will need it because of the next participant mostly.

Seagate Barracuda ATA IV: this is the newest Seagate's solution, which has proven very fast in our preliminary tests. Now it's high time we took a look at the mass piece performance. (Review)

Here is a comparative table of the hard disk drives features. Have a look:

It turns out that almost all the mentioned models have been already reviewed on our site or took part in roundups (except Fujitsu MPG3409AH-E that is why we will pay a bit more attention to its performance today). So, we assume that you should have at least some idea of their performance. But the present article aims at giving you the chance to compare them with one another, so that to make it easier for you to define your preferences. Anyway, we will skip the detailed description of the drives, as you may check the corresponding reviews for more details (see the links above) and pass over to what we are actually here for: the benchmarks.

Testbed and Methods

We tested the newcomer in the following test system:

• Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 600MHz CPU;
• ASUS CUBX-E mainboard, bios 1007A;
• 2x128MB PC133 SDRAM by Hyundai;
• Matrox Millennium 4MB graphics card;
• Windows 98/Windows 2000 Pro.

In order to check the HDDs performance in different UDMA modes, we had to use the following controllers:

• UDMA33: the controller integrated into i440BX chipset;
• UDMA66: Promise Ultra66 controller;
• UDMA100: integrated Promise Ultra100 controller.

For the Promise controllers we used the drivers ver. 1.60 (build 33).

The disk drives were connected as Master-units to a separate IDE-channel. DMA support in Windows was enabled. We used FAT32 and NTFS file systems to format each of them as one logical drive of the maximum size with the default cluster. All the tests were run 4 times and then the average results were taken for the diagrams. The HDDs didn't rest for cooling down between the tests.

Here are the benchmarks used:

• Windows 98 WinBench 99 1.2
• Adaptec Threadmark 2.0
• Windows 2000 WinBench 99 1.2
• HDTach 2.61
• IOMeter 1999.10.20

Performance

Access Time

As usual, we resorted to two tests to find out the average access time: HDTach and Winbench:

Fujitsu MPG AH-E HDD bravely jumped in between IBM Deskstar 60GXP and Quantum Fireball Plus AS, having proven that the claimed access time of 12.67ms (8.5ms + 4.17ms) is absolutely correct.

Sustained Linear Read Speed

Of course, we didn't expect Fujitsu HDD to show higher read speed than Seagate Barracuda ATA IV, but…

as we see, the linear read speed in the beginning shown by Fujitsu MPG AH-E is quite up to the today's standards for the drives with 7,200rpm rotation speed.

Although Fujitsu failed to appear among the first three leaders as far as the linear read speed in the beginning goes, the configuration of its platters (larger first zone and higher read speed in the end) let us suppose that it will boast relatively high average read rate.

HDTach 2.61

The diagram above shows the read speed from the hard disk cache. As you can notice, Fujitsu MPG AH-E is still lagging behind all the rest here. Just like Seagate Barracuda ATA IV…

However, you will be surprised to find out the results of Barracuda ATA III. It is simply fantastic, but the younger model managed to outperform its more recent brother!

Now let's compare the average read speeds of our testing participants.

As we have expected, Fujitsu takes the lead and competes with Seagate Barracuda ATA III only. The new Seagate solution, barracuda ATA IV, has some problems with HDTach in all modes except UDMA100 that is why it manages to win only in UDMA100 mode. Of course, Fujitsu also suffers some problems with UDMA33, however, they can hardly be compared with the UDMA33-problems of Barracuda ATA IV :)

Well, and as for the average read speed, Fujitsu suddenly won the race here! Frankly speaking, it seems to be a not that bad solution for video editing purposes with its 22MB/sec. It's a pity that 40GB storage capacity is actually too little for today.

WinBench99 for Windows 98

Here Fujitsu MPG AH-E is not that fast, but not too slow at the same time. We would call it a good medium player...

Yes! This is a sensation! Here Fujitsu HDD managed to beat everyone else, even including the IBM Deskstar 60GXP. Not bad, man.

Adaptec Threadmark 2.0

Now let's see how fast the drives work with the several streams of data simultaneously:

Again Fujitsu MPG3409AH-E appeared really cool. Even though it turned out slower than WD400 BB, it managed to beat all the rest. :-)

WinBench99 1.2 for Win2000 (FAT32)

Well, being the last but one is not the best thing you can think of, of course. We wonder what will happen in High-End benchmarks?

Well, Fujitsu MPG3409AH-E again performed very well having yielded just a little bit to IBM Deskstar 60GXP and having left behind Seagate Barracuda ATA IV.

WinBench99 1.2 for Win2000 (NTFS)

We are very much curious to see if the situation will repeat in NTFS file system. As we have already seen during numerous tests, not all the hard disk drives feel at home when the file system is changed from FAT32 to NTFS...

Look, WD400BB, which has been behind its competitors almost all the time, has now dashed forward. Fujitsu MPG3409AH-E fell slightly behind. We dare suppose that these are two HDDs with "preferable optimization": the one from Western Digital is optimized for NTFS, and the one from Fujitsu - for FAT32.

Here Fujitsu baby has again caught up with the rest of the drives and even competes with WD400BB and Seagate Barracuda ATA IV. Although in UDMA33, it is dramatically slow.

Intel IOMeter

The situation with Winbench99 is more or less clear now, and the favorites have been already singled out there. Let's see if they manage to take the laurels here as well.

As usual, we compare the Sum Total value, which is calculated taking into consideration the results obtained with Light, Moderate and Heavy loads (16, 64 and 256 requests). Of course, the higher is the value, the better:

No wonder happened. IBM Deskstar 60GXP left all the others far behind. We have already discussed what helps the IBM HDDs show such impressively high results in IOMeter in our article called IBM Deskstar 60GXP: Performance Secrets. As for Fujitsu MPG3409AH-E, this is simply not a server HDD.

Temperature

To measure the temperature we resorted to DTemp utility, which we have already used in our Seagate Barracuda ATA IV Review. However, it suddenly turned out that Quantum Fireball Plus AS doesn't support temperature monitoring, so we had to resort to some additional devices:

  

We took a special distant infrared thermometer, which helped us to control the environment temperature and to measure the temperature of the HDDs without the thermal diodes. To take the temperature you have just to target the "gun" to the top surface of the working hard disk and "fire".

The measuring procedure has been carried out for all the hard disk drives tested, and in all cases (except Quantum Fireball Plus AS) the temperature shown by the device coincided with the one displayed by the DTemp utility.

The room temperature stayed around 22^oC, and the measurements were made after more than 2.5 hours of IOMeter tests running. Here is what we've got (Quantum drive temperature was taken only with the infrared thermometer):

As you can see, the results turned out pretty unexpected. The "hottest" drive appeared Western Digital 400BB, and the "coolest" ones were Fujitsu MPG3409AH-E and IBM Deskstar 60GXP. Of course, there was only one model from each family tested, and it can hardly let us draw any too general conclusions about the tendencies, but…

Conclusion

Our tests revealed very interesting things, actually. Firstly, we once again proved that the mass Seagate Barracuda ATA IV HDD shows almost the same results and the sample drive we got first. Secondly, we found out that WD400BB available now is really made with 20GB platters. Thirdly, we took a closer look at the performance of Fujitsu MPG3409AH-E, and there was a real lot to look at, actually: beautiful results in Windows98, first prize in High-End Disk WinMark and good achievements in Win2000.

Also we would like to point out that the current Seagate Barracuda ATA III seems be somewhat faster than the earlier versions. Seagate seems to have improved seriously the firmware algorithm and implemented it into all the mass HDDs currently produced.

And in conclusion, we would like to single out highs and lows of the HDD, which we haven't yet tested in a separate review: Fujitsu MPG3409AH-E.

Highs:

• High performance in WinBench99;
• High linear read and write speeds;
• Good optimization for streaming tasks;
• Low heating;
• Low noise level.

Lows:

• Relatively small storage capacity.

It is a great pity that the general recession of the hardware market and competitors' pressure forced Fujitsu to leave the desktop HDD market for some time. As you see, they can make really great solutions. Hopefully, things will change for the better one day and we see Fujitsu back :)