Seagate's Cheetah 36XL is a 36.7GB, 10,000rpm, Ultra160 SCSI hard disk, and has been designed to provide outstanding performance and high capacity storage for workstations and servers. Does it do exactly what it says on the box? Let's see.

Installing the Cheetah 36XL is little different from installing any other SCSI drive, since jumpers have to be set to configure it. However, unlike most drives, two sets of jumpers are fitted on the ST336705LW; one set conventionally located at the rear, next to the interface and power connectors, and one set very conveniently at the front of the drive. Either of these sets of jumpers can be used to make all configuration settings. Incidentally, as well as being able to set the SCSI ID of the drive, the jumpers also allow you to provide terminator power to the bus, enable parity and even force single-ended mode - something that can be particularly handy when trouble-shooting compatibility problems.

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Another unusual aspect of the Cheetah 36XL is that it features SAMS (Seagate Advanced Multidrive System) technology. This is designed to allow the drive to better withstand the technical and vibration-related problems associated with mounting multiple drives in a single system. In fact according to Seagate, in a worst case scenario, SAMS allows drives like the Cheetah 36XL to perform up to 50 percent better than a more conventional model, and even in a more realistic scenario involving just three drives mounted in the same drive bay, a performance improvement of around 8 percent can be achieved.

Having been supplied with only one drive, we were unable to test how well SAMS actually works in practice, and were unwilling to balance our PC on top of a pneumatic drill to 'simulate' such vibrations. We were able to determine how well the drive performed as a stand-alone unit, however, and with an extremely quick average seek time of just 5.2ms, a 4MB data buffer and a 10,000rpm rotation speed, we expected very high performance indeed.

Expected and actual performance often differ, of course, in hard drives as in other aspects of life, but in this case we weren't disappointed. In fact, in our tests, which were conducted on a 1GHz Pentium III-based PC fitted with an Adaptec 39160 Ultra160 SCSI interface, we found that the Cheetah 36XL was able to produce a maximum sustained throughput of a little over 40MB/sec. This is a very high transfer rate, and compares favourably with the 30GB/sec or so a typical modern 7,200rpm drives is capable of. We were also pleased to note that the Cheetah 36XL was not noticeably noisier in use than a 7,200rpm model.

A very fast and well-engineered drive, the Cheetah 36XL's only drawback is its price, which reflects its very high specification. When performance is more important than cost, however, this drive won't disappoint.