Seagate Cheetah 10k.6 Review
Reviewed by Andrew Chalfant on 05.20.2003
Provided by Seagate

The Drive and Installation

The Cheetah 10k.6 appears to be just another hard drive, but upon closer inspection there are more jumpers, and with more jumpers comes more variables in setting up the device to work properly. The first thing to set up when installing a SCSI drive is its SCSI ID. Instead of having MASTER or SLAVE designations, up to 15 devices can be used per SCSI channel (as opposed to 2 with IDE). If you are only going to have one device on the channel, then channel zero will be used, so we can leave the default setting be. However, if you are running multiple devices per channel, you must assign each device its own unique SCSI ID. After setting a SCSI ID it is necessary to configure termination. The Cheetah 10k.6 drive does not have an internal terminator, so external termination needs to be provided. Thankfully, the sample card that was sent with the drive for testing purposes provided a cable with an external terminator. When setting up multiple devices per channel, the device at the end of the chain is where termination will need to be placed. Finally, there are some more jumpers that can be set. On the jumper block two, the most important thing that you can set is whether the device operates as a Single-Ended device (SE) or an LVD device. It is extremely important that the Cheetah 10k.6 is set to LVD mode, otherwise its performance will be incredibly low. Also, SCSI is as fast as the slowest device on the channel - which means that if you have both LVD and SE devices, give them seperate channels, unless you want to run everything in SE mode. Overall, installing the Cheetah 10k.6 was fairly easy - everything worked as it needed to.

Techware Labs would also like to thank Adaptec for supplying us with a 29320-R SCSI adapter for testing. The Adaptec SCSI Card 29320-R is a half-size, 64-bit 133 MHz PCI-X, single-channel Ultra320 SCSI card with integrated HostRAID - obviously the card is meant to be used with the faster PCI-X bus, but unfortunately all that we have access to here is a regular 33-MHz PCI bus. The great thing about this card is it's versatility - it has legacy SCSI interfaces and it can be used with regular PCI.