Let's first start out with something simple. I ran the disk benchmark included in SiSoft Sandra 2000 and here were the results (note, these results were almost completely identical in both Windows 98 and 2000, so I just included one graph).

Well, the graph speaks for itself. The newer Fireball LM with it's 10 GB per platter and 8.5 ms access time clearly gives the score a nice boost of 13%.

Again, we see that the Fireball LM with its newer technology allows it to pull ahead of the IBM Deskstar 34GXP all across the board, this time with an increase of 18-25%.

We also received results for the access time and maximum burst rate of each of the drives, but decided not to put them in a graphical form as it wouldn't have helped much anyways. The average access times reported by HDTach were 9.1 ms and 10.9 ms for the Quantum Fireball Plus LM and the IBM Deskstar 34GXP respectively and the read burst speed for the Fireball LM was 44 megabytes/second and was 43.6 megabytes/second for the IBM. In both of these tests, we see that the Quantum beats the older IBM quite nicely.

On to: Benchmarks - Conclusion