Western Digital WD1500ADFD: King Raptor
by Gary Key on February 8, 2006 1:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Hard Disk Performance: iPEAK
We played back Anand's raw files that recorded I/O operations when running a real world benchmark - the entire Winstone 2004 suite. Intel's iPEAK utility was then used to play back the trace file of all I/O operations that took place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. The drive was formatted before each test run and a composite average of 3 tests on each drive was tabulated in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark.
iPeak gives a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the average time that each drive took to fulfill each I/O operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance.
The performance of the Raptor WD1500 is extremely impressive and represents a 13% increase over the Raptor 740GD in the Business Winstone test and an incredible 33% increase in the Content Creation Winstone test. Turning NCQ on results in a hit of 8% in the Business Winstone test and 9% in the Content Creation Winstone test. Although the drive maintains excellent performance with NCQ activated we highly recommend turning it off when used in a single-user environment. While the WD1500 random access times are slightly higher than the Raptor 740GD, the overall performance of this drive is consistently better. The Samsung SP2504C provides excellent results considering the bargain pricing on the drive and leads the Maxtor 7L300S0 in most of the test results.
We played back Anand's raw files that recorded I/O operations when running a real world benchmark - the entire Winstone 2004 suite. Intel's iPEAK utility was then used to play back the trace file of all I/O operations that took place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. The drive was formatted before each test run and a composite average of 3 tests on each drive was tabulated in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark.
iPeak gives a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the average time that each drive took to fulfill each I/O operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance.
The performance of the Raptor WD1500 is extremely impressive and represents a 13% increase over the Raptor 740GD in the Business Winstone test and an incredible 33% increase in the Content Creation Winstone test. Turning NCQ on results in a hit of 8% in the Business Winstone test and 9% in the Content Creation Winstone test. Although the drive maintains excellent performance with NCQ activated we highly recommend turning it off when used in a single-user environment. While the WD1500 random access times are slightly higher than the Raptor 740GD, the overall performance of this drive is consistently better. The Samsung SP2504C provides excellent results considering the bargain pricing on the drive and leads the Maxtor 7L300S0 in most of the test results.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
51 Comments
View All Comments
jamescleant - Wednesday, February 8, 2006 - link
I noticed you revised your acoustic testing, but this leads to a different ranking when compared to the one in the article :"Seagate 7200.9 160GB: The Highest Platter Density to Date!"
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2682&a...">http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2682&a...
In the article mentionned above, the idle noise of the 500 GB 7200.9 is lower than the idle noise of the 74 GB Raptor, and in this article, it is the contrary.
What is the explanation of this ?
Also, did you test the acoustics of the Samsung SP2504C with the "old" method ? I am interested by the comparison with other models (I try to have the most silent drives).
Gary Key - Wednesday, February 8, 2006 - link
I will detail a response tonight and test the SP2504c with the old standard.Gary Key - Wednesday, February 8, 2006 - link
I am still working on providing the old numbers. I did locate the original sound meter used and will have it here tomorrow.noxipoo - Wednesday, February 8, 2006 - link
3 seagate 7200.9 in raid 0 vs 1 raptor? about the same price point, would be interesting.mlittl3 - Wednesday, February 8, 2006 - link
See my post above. Gamepc did 4 rapters in raid 0 versus scsi and P-ATA drive.sxpose - Wednesday, February 8, 2006 - link
Id like to see some raided drive scores as well. Because this drive is marketed at enthusists . . . good chance some will just buy two and raid them. Majority of the readers don't have scsi drives, so not sure why you'd choose those benchmarks over some consumer raided drives.mlittl3 - Wednesday, February 8, 2006 - link
See my post above for raid tests.Orbs - Wednesday, February 8, 2006 - link
First of all, another great article, AT!So RAID was debated in the comments of the last HDD article AT posted, and while traditionally RAID hasn't shown much of a performance improvement, the fact that nearly all enthusiast motherboards now come with some sort of RAID controller and since the Raptors now use a native Serial ATA interface, the story might have changed.
Can AT do a RAID shootout or something? I would be very interested in something like that.
Again, great article!
Gary Key - Wednesday, February 8, 2006 - link
We will have updated benchmarks or a new article with RAID results for this drive and others in the near future. Thank you.Zebo - Saturday, February 11, 2006 - link
Waste of time but I guess when the RAID freaks demand it they get it.