While not a newcomer to the hard drive market, Fujitsu has been rather quiet for the past couple of years releasing sub-par drives that offered nothing in price or performance that was very interesting. Now it seems that Fujitsu may be back on the ball as is witnessed by their latest SCSI and UDMA/66 offerings. Recently joining the industry leaders in SCSI by offering its 10,000 RPM drives, Fujitsu is already starting to make itself known. With drives like the MPD3182-AH, it won't be long before Fujitsu is said in the same breath as Quantum, Seagate and Western Digital.
The MPD3182-AH is certainly one of the quietest drives we have ever had the pleasure of listening to (or not listening to for that matter). Inside a case, this gem is virtually noise-free, and even out in the open, hardly even hums. Although not really a reason alone for buying a drive, the lack of noise adds to its overall value and is certainly a worthy tiebreaker.
Sporting almost all of the same features as the Fireball, the Fujitsu drive excels in the intangibles as well as offering a slight speed boost. With the same 512KB cache, 7200 RPM rotational speed and a slightly slower access time (at 9.0ms) the Fujitsu drive seems ready to play with the big boys - but still was not expected to win.
But win it did. Where the Fujitsu drive really shines is real world benchmarks. While lagging behind the Fireball in measured seek times by almost 2 ms, its average read speed clocks in at about 8% faster. This translates into some marginal differences in real world benchmarks such as Winbench99. Posting about 5% higher than the Fireball when in UDMA/66 mode, the Fujitsu is a clear champion when it comes to speed. Even without the UDMA/66 mode enabled, the drive posts numbers very close to that of the Fireball.
Verdict
Fujitsu clearly has a winner with the MPD3182-AH, and will certainly be a player in the advent of the UDMA/66 standard. Despite almost identical spec sheets with the Fireball, Fujitsu delivers that extra performance boost and one of the quietest operations in the industry - definitely worthy of some attention.