In terms of speed, the Fujitsu drive can certainly hold its own in the world of modern hard drives, beating out the slightly older 9 Gig Cheetah 9LP by a reasonable margin, and making the IDE drive look like a chump. Showing up the IDE drive by about 70%, it's no wonder that people are so high on SCSI. With drives this fast, the only thing holding people back is price.

Though at first glance it may seem as though the Fujitsu is a great performer at the cost of hogging your CPU, that is not really the case. With 10% more CPU utilization than the IDE drive, it is certainly something to consider. But stop and think. The Fujitsu drive would use 24% of your CPU during a 100MB read, which only takes 3.5 seconds. The IDE drive, on the other hand, uses only 14% of your CPU, but would take about 8 seconds. To compare these side by side, we can multiply to get CPU-seconds. In the case of the Fujitsu drive, this is 0.84 CPU-seconds, and for the IDE, it is 1.12 CPU-seconds. So the Fujitsu drive actually uses less of your system resources.

Although the Cheetah drive is an older generation 9 Gig drive, it is still impressive that it looks so pale in comparison to the Fujitsu drive. With a read transfer speed of almost double the 9Gig drive, the areal density really shines through. With 3.6 Gigs per platter compared to the Cheetah's 1.5, it is no surprise that at the same rotational speed, the Fujitsu drive is a clear champion.

Unfortunately, raw read speeds do not translate linearly into real world performance, as shown by the Winbench scores. While the Fujitsu drive is still head and shoulders above the other drives, the percentages are a lot less impressive than the raw speeds. Even so, Winbench takes more into account than just sequential reading, and goes to prove the robustness of this drive.

The benefits of this drive go beyond what the benchmarks can tell you, however. Running without a hitch, and with hardly a sound, this drive delivers satisfaction. Running with this drive in our test system was smooth as could be, and everything seemed to go just a little faster when running off of it.