Hitachi vs. Western Digital vs. Seagate: A Battle of the Mammoths
by Purav Sanghani on December 2, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Test
Our test bed specs have been laid out below. We used Western Digital's 160GB 3.0 Gb/sec drive, since it was the quickest in our 3-way SATA 3.0Gb/sec Shootout.
Our test bed:
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz)
Giga-byte GA-K8NXP-SLI
Western Digital WD1600JS
NVIDIA 6600GT SLI Edition (single 128MB card )
1GB (512MBx2) Corsair XMS4400
Our motherboard is an nForce4 based board, which features support for the SATA II standard, up to 3.0 Gb/sec SATA transfer rates, and NCQ and TCQ.
We used the following nForce platform drivers in conjunction with our testbed:
nForce4 Chipset Driver 6.66
NVIDIA graphics driver 71.89
Windows XP SP2 w/out further updates
More details about each individual test will appear in the section of the review dedicated to that particular test.
Our test bed specs have been laid out below. We used Western Digital's 160GB 3.0 Gb/sec drive, since it was the quickest in our 3-way SATA 3.0Gb/sec Shootout.
Our test bed:
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz)
Giga-byte GA-K8NXP-SLI
Western Digital WD1600JS
NVIDIA 6600GT SLI Edition (single 128MB card )
1GB (512MBx2) Corsair XMS4400
Our motherboard is an nForce4 based board, which features support for the SATA II standard, up to 3.0 Gb/sec SATA transfer rates, and NCQ and TCQ.
We used the following nForce platform drivers in conjunction with our testbed:
nForce4 Chipset Driver 6.66
NVIDIA graphics driver 71.89
Windows XP SP2 w/out further updates
| AnandTech Storage Tests | |
| 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 |
| Half-Life 2 Level Load Test | Half-Life 2 level load time test |
| Doom 3 Level Load Test | Doom 3 level load time test |
| Command & Conquer: Generals Level Load Test | Command & Conquer: Generals level load time test |
| Real World File System Task Tests | timed tests of basic file system tasks including zipping/unzipping and copying files |
| HDTach | Synthetic test for transfer rate of hard disk during a full disk read |
| Service Time and Transfer Rate Tests | Synthetic tests for average service time and transfer rate of hard disk during a full disk read |
| Business Winstone 2004 Multitasking Test | Synthetic tests for overall system multitasking performance |
| Real World Multitasking Test | timed tests of basic multitasking processes, timing a file zip operation while importing Outlook data |
More details about each individual test will appear in the section of the review dedicated to that particular test.
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Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
I can understand mentioning AGP, but PCI? You gotta be kidding me... that bus is such a bottleneck. You dont even have to run PCI cards to find out, just stress all the on-board stuff on a feature rich mobo and you'll notice it too.
Cygni - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Which explains the rush from the mfts to get PCI-Ex cards out the door. :p Really, the only 2 cards that i can see benifiting from the PCI Express bus are high level RAID cards and gigabit ethernet... both of which are being fully integrated into southbridges anyway.Hikari - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
You said AGP and PCI, not AGP and PCIe. Obviously there isn't a lot of difference between the latter, but there is quite a bit of difference between the former.Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
They are integrated into southbridge and still utilize the PCI bus mostly. PCI bus aint only the slot you see on your mobo, you know..Anton74 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
High level RAID? A single PATA drive has an interface speed identical to that of the PCI bus (133MB/s) these days, all by itself. And then there's SATA with 150MB/s and 300MB/s interface speeds now. Not to mention the PCI bus is usually shared with a multitude of devices, all wanting some bandwidth.puffpio - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
It seems anomalous that the Western Digital Raptor 10000RPM drive is sooo much slower in the Doom 3 level load test compared to all the other drives. It sticks out like a sore thumb. It doesn't make sense because it had been dominating the other tests...