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| Page 1 of 1 | Author: kan
Date of review: 14-June-1999
Type Of Review: Harddisks |
Features
- Industry's highest-performance 10,000-RPM 3.5 inch disc drive
- Average seek times as fast as 5.2 msec
- Seagate's second-generation Cheetah™ : new low powerUnsurpassed formatted data rates of 14.5 to 21.3 Mbytes per second
- High-Performance Ultra2 SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces
The Cheetah is regarded as the industry fastest hard drive.
Opening up the box, I was greeted with a comprehensive manual. The detailed manual is over 50 pages and contains information like installing the hard drive, jumper settings etc. It even contain diagrams on how to improve the air ventilation for your system, the minimum clearance needed for proper ventilation etc.
In the manual, it states that the drive generated will be very hot and warn the user to ensure the drive is properly cooled. To play safe, I put a fan directly on top of the drive. With the fan, the drive runs cool to the touch. Without it, I believe you can have a Korean barbecue on top of the drive.
Installation wasn't smooth for me. I burnt my first Cheetah (Yup, you read me) due to a power surge in my system. After getting another new piece, I decided to play safe. I bought an external SCSI casing with a dedicated PSU just for the Cheetah. The SCSI casing cost me $200, and the external Ultra-Wide cable cost me $75 ! Can someone tell me why they are so EXPENSIVE?
Installation of the 2nd Cheetah wasn't smooth too. The drive kept crashing, was unreliable and most of the time, I could not even format the drive properly. After fiddling with my Adaptec 2940UW settings, I had to step down the UltraWide settings of 40 MB/s to 32 MB/s in order to use it properly. 
Going to the Adaptec website, I found out that the problem may be due to a termination problem. I currently have a 'star' SCSI chain, which theoretically, WILL NOT work as a SCSI chain must be in a linear bus in order for the signals to propagate properly.
I should be able to solve this problem and step up to 40 MB/s again, but I'm afraid I will crash my data again and I won't do it until I backup my current data.
Do not be intimated by my experience with the Cheetah. It's the fastest drive out there and if you do not have a system as lousy as mine, you should not have a problem.
In short, if you have $1800 to spend, the Cheetah is one of the fastest drive to get in the market.
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