Overall System Performance - Winstone 2004

Business Winstone 2004

Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:
  • Microsoft Access 2002
  • Microsoft Excel 2002
  • Microsoft FrontPage 2002
  • Microsoft Outlook 2002
  • Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
  • Microsoft Project 2002
  • Microsoft Word 2002
  • Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
  • WinZip 8.1

Business Winstone 2004

The 7200.8 scored a 24.7 in the Business Winstone 2004 suite. We wondered how it could be possible to see Maxtor's 5400RPM DiamondMax 16 scoring higher than the Seagate drive.

MCC Winstone 2004

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:
  • Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0.1
  • Adobe® Premiere® 6.50
  • Macromedia® Director MX 9.0
  • Macromedia® Dreamweaver MX 6.1
  • Microsoft® Windows MediaTM Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
  • NewTek's LightWave® 3D 7.5b
  • SteinbergTM WaveLabTM 4.0f

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004

We don't see much of a difference between the drives in the Content Creation portion of Winstone 2004, but overall, the Barracuda performs as well as Maxtor's DiamondMax 10.

Pure Hard Disk Performance - IPEAK Overall System Performance - SYSMark 2004
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  • PuravSanghani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    mjz5: With our nForce4 platform there is an option under the drive controllers options tab called "Enable command queuing". By checking this option and restarting the system, command queuing will be enabled. Some boards, however, enable NCQ/TCQ by default through the BIOS. You may want to check with your motherboard manual on that.

    Take care,

    Purav
  • mjz5 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Nighteye2 has a good question. How does NCQ work with RAID arrays? Is it better, worse???

    How would I know if TCQ is enabled on my 74 raptor?
  • xsilver - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    #21 LOL --- you wouldnt want that space anyways even if it was there.... its cant be guaranteed reliable so would you trust 100gb's of your drive that could die at any moment???
  • quorm - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I have one of the 300gb 7200.8 drives. It's mentioned in the article that all of the 7200.8 drives use a 3x133gb platter configuration. I was wondering if there is any hack to allow access to the remaining 100gb of disk space. Anyone?
  • AtaStrumf - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Hey, where did all the WD drives (apart from Raptor obviously) go??? I can get a 200 GB PATA model pretty cheap, so I'm seriously considering it. Any advice anyone?
  • n7 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Thanx for the review guys :)

    flatblastard: I'd agree.

    The Raptors may not win all the benches, but i find they feel so much snappier than my other 7200RPM drives.

    I certainly wouldn't mind adding a 400 Gb Seagate to my collection though :)

  • bob661 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Can you guys post a UT2004 for load time graph please.
  • flatblastard - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I'm using the raptor for my OS, and the 250GB seagate 7200.8 for everything else. I really can't tell which one is faster at loading games...but the raptor is MUCH quicker loading anything else.
  • Icehawk - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Where were the heavier real-world multi-tasking tests like in the Intel DC previews? In those articles it appeared that NCQ offered some performance boost in heavy I/O situations - here it seems to offer zero benefit.
  • Houdani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I dunno. Neither the Seagate nor the Maxtor NCQ drive really impressed me. They didn't stand out from the peleton. For most performance needs, I'd have to give the yellow jersey to the Raptor, although the idle heat is a noteworthy ding.

    For extra capacity one of the larger models would be prudent, but for a primary drive the Raptor is fairly impressive.

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