Pure Hard Disk Performance - IPEAK

We begin our usual hard disk drive test session with Intel's IPEAK benchmarking utility. We first run a trace capture on Winstone 2004's Business and Multimedia Content Creation benchmark runs to catch all of the IO operations that take place during each test. We then play each capture back using RankDisk which reports back to us a mean service time, or average time the drive takes to complete an IO operation.

IPEAK Business Winstone 2004 - Pure Hard Disk Performance

Western Digital's Raptor tops this list as its 10,000RPM spindle produces the most IO operations of the group. The 7200.8 does not fare as well even with NCQ turned on.

Let's take a look at Content Creation performance.

IPEAK Content Creation Winstone 2004 - Pure Hard Disk Performance

The 400GB Barracuda performs much better here at 384 IO operations per second. Again, the Raptor takes first place at 490 operations per second.

IPEAK Average Read Service Time

The Barracuda's service times were some of the highest out of all the drives, even with NCQ on. Suprisingly, the 7200.7 came in higher than the majority of the newer drives on the list.

The Test Overall System Performance - Winstone 2004
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  • StormGod - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Hey Anandtech, please make sure your pages are 100% Firefox compatible! While were on the subject, you should really strive to make your pages HTML 4.01 compliant or XHTML 1.0 compliant.
  • cosmotic - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I was going to comment on the headings too...
  • SLIM - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    The shading and color fill behind the headings and drive names is also missing in firefox. You can highlight the column headings to read what they are supposed to say in firefox. Glad I downloaded that ieview extension now.
  • bigboxes - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Yup. The column headers for these tables do not show up in Firefox.
  • shoRunner - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    the column labels don't show up in firefox.
  • shoRunner - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

  • PuravSanghani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    segagenesis: It seems to be an issue with our sound meter or noise reduction process. We will look into it for our next review. Besides the echo, the recordings should be clear enough to differentiate how each drive sounds.

    Nighteye2: Your requests will be fulfilled soon. :)
  • Nighteye2 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    You know, with all this talk about NCQ, 1 question has not yet been answered: how does it work with RAID? Can you use NCQ on a RAID system?

    Also, I'd like to see these tests run on a RAID system, see the performance advantage it gives. Maybe compare 2 cheap, somewhat slower drives in a RAID array against a single HD that you can get for the same price?
  • segagenesis - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    The benchmarks are hardly cut and dry yes, but I do enjoy the fact Seagate has a 5 year warranty on drives. This after seeing the industry at one point was putting out 1-year warranty stock on drives and if you paid extra, 3 years.

    Raptors are the fastest drives ive ever seen but the lack of space keeps them from being all inclusive. I was kind of suprised that the 7200.8 beat out the Raptor as far as game loading went!

    Whats with the weird echo-ish sound recordings of the hard drive noise? What on earth did you use to do this?
  • FreshPrince - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    man, I need to learn how to use this...anyways...I bought 40 of these drives for my company.

    16 goes into one raid and another 16 goes into another raid. So far so good, I hear no complaints from my tech guys.

    Also, I took 2 and used it as a DFS file server, it's handling 75 users no problems. :-)

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