Q2 2004 Desktop Hard Drive Comparison: WD Raptor vs the World
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 7, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Test
Our hard drive test bed is designed to shift the bottlenecks, as much as possible, onto the hard drive, but while still within reason. To accomplish that purpose, our test bed is configured as follows:
Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz
Intel D875PBZ Motherboard
1GB DDR400 SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (128MB)
Creative Labs Audigy
Ultra ATA/100 or Serial ATA 150 cables were used where appropriate
The important drivers used are as follows:
Intel Chipset INF 5.1.1002
ATI Catalyst 4.5
Windows XP Service Pack 1 (no further updates were installed)
What's important to point out is that although we could have outfitted our test bed with 256MB of memory, we wanted to avoid over-exaggerating the performance impact of the hard drive. After all, if your system is swapping to disk a lot, you should be considering a memory upgrade before or in tandem with a hard drive upgrade.
The tests we run are as follows:
Business Winstone IPEAK - a playback test of all of the IO operations that occur within Business Winstone 2004.
Content Creation IPEAK - a playback test of all of the IO operations that occur within Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004.
Business Winstone 2004 - the official Business Winstone 2004 test suite.
Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 - the official Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test suite.
SYSMark 2004 - the official SYSMark 2004 test suite.
Far Cry Level Load Test - a timed test of loading a level in Far Cry.
Unreal Tournament 2004 Level Load Test - a timed test of loading a level in Unreal Tournament 2004.
More details about each individual test will appear in the section of the review dedicated to that particular test.
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T8000 - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
One point I did not see in the review was the partition information.This may be important, because smaller partitions usually perform better, because of their smaller allocation table and possibly even a smaller cluster size.
It would be best to use a drive image that fits on all drives and load it on each drive for testing, to make sure smaller drives are not given an advantage over bigger drives and fragmentation is the same for all drives.
Did you use this method?
broberts - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
It would be nice if you included the actual model numbers of the tested drives.Perhaps I'm missing something but ISTM that comparing benchmarks of SATA drives against those running at PATA-100 is questionable. Especially since most of the numbers reported are within 5% of each other. Why weren't SATA models of the 8MB/7200 drives used?
jrphoenix - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
I have submitted my request to Anand. I would like to see the new Seagate and Hitachi drives. The new 7200 rpm Seagates (shipping this month) support NCQ and are supposedly quicker than the raptors at a lower price!!! :)Crassus - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Anand,I would have liked to see also the performance of 2 Raptors of both generations in RAID 0, at least with the integrated controllers (ICH5 etc.).
Nighteye2 - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
It's good to see this test, but why are the raptors the only SATA drives? It would be good to add in a SATA WD 7200 RPM 8 MB drive (80 GB, 120 GB, or another size)trexpesto - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Since with buying technology part of the equation is how long to hold off, it would be cool to get a head's up on stuff in the pipeline like the NCQ/TCQ drives.http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/relea...
Apologiliac - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
I was startled how quiet the seagate was, because i was wating for it to turn on (?...!) I was also laughing out loud after the new raptor played because it immediately followed by gangsters paradise by weird al on my playlist :pdeathwalker - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
I am somewhat dissapointed that this review did not include at least a couple of competing SATA drives...such as maybe a Seagate and Maxtor drive. The majority of the community already assumes the advantages of SATA over PATA!!Blain - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
A 75GXP? You gotta be kiddin'Why not run the other drives against a new Hitachi?
For crying out loud! :o
Z80 - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Your review was right on target for my needs. I was considering upgrading my 120GB Maxtor to a new WD 74GB Raptor. Looks like I can save my money now or spend it on an upgrade that gives more bang for the buck. Thanks