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Wow, this is great! The performance is insanely fast! We have already see WD Raptor drive run as fast as 16MB/s in Business Disk WinMark (see our review called WD Raptor: First ATA Hard Disk Drive with 10,000rpm Speed). However, Maxtor Atlas 15K demonstrated simply fantastic results in High-End Disk WinMark: 50MB/s!! Although on the other hand, this result is achieved by a HDD with 15,000rpm spindle rotation speed and 8MB cache-buffer, and working with a very fast (and smart) SCSI controller.

The obtained results showed that the first Maxtor engineers’ experience in terms of 15K HDD design appeared a success. The drive proved very fast in server patterns and especially in DataBase pattern. I also can’t help pointing out its extremely high performance during sequential read and write requests processing, which makes Atlas 15K a great choice for video editing systems.

And of course, I admire the way U320 SCSI interface support is implemented in Maxtor Atlas 15K drive. As you saw, the drive works perfectly well with it.

However, high performance is not enough for making an Enterprise drive commercially successful. Therefore. Maxtor started working on compatibility certification for its SCSI drives by SCSI RAID controller, SCA-chassises and ready data storage systems manufacturers. The current compatibility list is available here.