Showing about a 5% lead in Winbench99 scores, the Fujitsu delivers above average performance for its drive class and outshines even Quantum - an industry leader. With about an 8% edge on the read speed as reported by HD Tachometer, the Fujitsu easily nudges past the Fireball in real world performance, despite the Fireball's superb access times. However, the Fujitsu still lags behind in the capacity area. With about 200 MB more hard drive space, the Quantum certainly has the edge when it comes to capacity. Although most of us won't care about 200 MB (as it is just over 1% of the total drive capacity), it is still worth a small mention.

Finally, with respect to non-UDMA/66 operation, the drives perform almost equally. Therefor some of the intangibles (and maybe even the 200 extra Megabytes) become even more important to the decision making process. While most of us will have UDMA/66 controllers on any computer bought within the next year or so, these non-UDMA/66 numbers become less important, we focus on the UDMA/66 mode performance where the Fujitsu drive shows a clear advantage.

Quantum, the highest volume supplier of desktop hard drives worldwide, has come a long way since its original Fireball drives hit the market. While Quantum has a history of shipping its latest generation of drives sometimes months after its competitors, the Fireball KA has broken free from that mold and shipped in the same time frame as the rest of its generation. Quantum has also long been the leader of the 5400RPM domain and now, with its first foray into the 7200 RPM ring, threatens yet again to be the leader in performance.

Along with its 7200 RPM rotational speed, the Fireball KA series boasts a whopping 8.5ms advertised average access time - more typical of a SCSI drive than an IDE drive. Similar to the Fujitsu drive, the Fireball KA has an areal density of 4.6 Gigabytes/Platter and a cache size of 512KB -- right at the industry's norm for its price.

Weighing in around 200 MB more than the Fujitsu drive, the Fireball is certainly a little better in terms of storage space. This may not be worth much to many users, as we mentioned, this amounts to little over 1% of the drive's total capacity.

Where the drive falters though is in noise and heat. Although to some it is a small price to pay for the added access time, the noise may be a nuisance to others - especially considering similar performance can be found at lower costs. Its heat may also be something of an issue, running slightly hotter than the Fujitsu drive, and hotter than most 7200 RPM IDE drives.

Verdict

While Quantum drives never fail to disappoint (and this is certainly no exception), the Fireball KA lags behind the Fujitsu drive in transfer speeds and the Fireball's access times can not seem to compensate for this as seen in real world performance tests. While this speed difference is hardly noticeable in every day usage, its higher noise output and slightly slower transfer rates push this drive to our runner up position.