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
Pure Hard Disk Performance
Although the point of our test suite is to focus on real world performance, it is useful to look at some theoretical numbers in order to get an idea of drive superiority.
To measure "pure" hard disk performance, we took a real world benchmark - in this case, the entire Winstone 2004 suite - and used Intel's IPEAK utility to capture a trace file of all of the IO operations that take place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. We then use IPEAK to play back the trace, much like a timedemo, on each of the hard drives, which gives us a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the average time that each drive took to fulfill each IO operation.
In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of IO operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance.
Keep in mind that these performance scores are best only for comparing pure hard disk performance, and in no way do they reflect the actual real world performance impact of these hard drives.
For descriptions of what the Business and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests consist of, reference those benchmark pages.
We see from the Business Winstone IPEAK scores that the two Raptor drives are, by far, the highest performers out of the bunch.
As our focus shifts down to the 7200RPM 8MB cache drives, we see that they all offer similar performance. In this case, the Western Digital WD1200JB and the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 offer basically identical performance. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 falls behind somewhat, but what matters most is how these drives perform in the real world.
Looking at the older IBM 75GXP and Maxtor D740X drives, it's interesting to see that the fastest drives of today are around twice as fast as the fastest drives from a few years ago.
As we look at Multimedia Content Creation IPEAK performance, we see that the two Raptors continue to maintain a significant performance advantage over the competition. There is a bit of place switching as the Seagate 7200.7 and WD 1200JB perform much closer, with the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 holding a bit of a lead.
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Athlonite - Saturday, March 24, 2007 - link
both raptor drives are SATA and all the other drives are Pata i know for a fact the seagate baracuda 7200.7 comes in a sata II form coz i have two of them in raid 0 i'd pit the against your single raptor any day of the week as i said like comaring apples with peaspeufeu - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
Stop benchmarking copies of 1 MB files !Linux, with reiserfs4 :
My crap laptop harddrive does about 16 MB/second raw bandwidth. It does 15 MB/second reading 20 KBytes files. Not that bad.
I'd like to see the raptor benchmarked with reiser4. I'm pretty sure it can sustain at least 80% of its peak bandwidth with 1kbyte files...
jferdina - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
here is a link:http://www.buildsilentpc.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t...
jferdina - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
I want to WARN you all of Seagate Barracuda 7200.7I just bought one for 1 day and I am terribly disappointed.
Unlike the seagate barracuda 7200.7 that was tested by AnandTech, the newer version is EXTREMELY noisy. It is the most noisiest HD that I have ever had.
The reason is Seagate got into a lawsuit problem with Convolve. Apparently Seagate steals their technology, and at least for now they have to remove it. The technology is 'Automatic Acoustic Management' (AAM).
But for those of you who are tricked, like me, there is some information that may give a hope, AAM is still there but they set it in "performance" mode by default on current firmware. But hardware.fr claimed they had firmware 3.16 and could change the setting.
So MAYBE IF they can settle the lawsuit, Seagate would provide firmware upgrade to solve this problem.
Anandtech, please change your review about Seagate since the information is already old because it is very frustrating for customers that wishes to find an accurate info, gets the completely opposite result from what informed.
Fietsventje - Wednesday, June 16, 2004 - link
I didn't read all of the comments, but I would like to say that I, like some others here, would like to see what impact a RAID0-array has on these benchmarks. Could finally resolve the ever-lasting discussion (at least, for myself) about the influence of a RAID-0-setup to general performance.Greetz,
Fietsventje
skyce - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link
I would really like to see a comparison of one 74GB SATA Raptor 10k to two new Raptors in Raid0. I'm building a system over the next couple months and would like to have this drive in my system, but am somewhat reluctant to fork over another $200 for a second drive for Raid0, as Wesley suggested in his High End System Guide (May 26th).HelzBelz - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link
... and also, it just so happens that I've just received the exact same hardware (see previous post), but for 2 different systems (upgrades for other people).
i.e. 2x 80GB ATA WD 8Meg w/ Highpoint 370 PCI RAID Card, and one 74GB SATA Raptor 10k...
Perhaps we could then compare results !?
Regards,
HelzBelz
HelzBelz - Monday, June 14, 2004 - link
Perhaps this has already been suggested, but here it goes:
- What about a RAID0 test of some pair of less expensive drives VS a Single Raptor ?
i.e. For "about the same money", I've often been asked: "Which of the abobe is better / faster ?"
For example, one could compare the performance of a "2x WD 80GB 8MB cache RAID0" setup, versus a Single 74GB Raptor 10k drive; since either way, you're paying about the same total price...
Just a thought,
HelzBelz
artifex - Sunday, June 13, 2004 - link
I'd like to get a MTBF comparison, not just some data on warranties, too. Or better yet, it would be cool for Anandtech to actually set up a system to run the test drives continuously until they start failing.Why? Our local Fry's often has drives like the PATA version of a Hitachi 200GB on sale for $50 after rebates, but if they burn up or crash in half the time as a $100 drive, I'd much rather get the $100 drive. This is particularly important for applications like adding drives to PVRs, where it's not easy to remap around known bad sectors after they're found, and at least one manufacturer's low level formatting utility won't work with Nforce-based IDE, so remapping at the lower level is out also.
I'm also hoping for thermal comparisons; in small form factor enclosures this is just as important as noise.
MadAd - Saturday, June 12, 2004 - link
IMO you are missing a very important 'real world' test that has always interested me on machines through years.Test: Tester starts stopwatch as power button us pressed. Tester stops stopwatch at the point that the desktop appears ready for use...... Record Time Taken. Thats it!
The funny thing is youve probably not realised how much you run this 'test' and its a valid one insofar as everyone needs to boot up at some point - just please, do us a favor, time it and chart it? :)
Thanks