Seagate 7200.10 500GB: Hitting the Sweet Spot

iPEAK Video/Audio Tests

The iPEAK based Video/Audio benchmarks are designed around simulating media encoding and HTPC activities. These are basic benchmarks at this time but this section will be expanded in the future. These benchmarks are CPU intensive in nature but also require a balanced storage system with the ability to handle read and write requests simultaneously in a very efficient manner. Using iPEAK also effectively removes the CPU from the equation, allowing us to focus on the hard drives.



The AnyDVD benchmark is heavily weighted to sequential write requests which favor the Seagate drive over the other 500GB offerings. We noticed the Seagate 7200.10 drives pausing a couple of times during streamed writes due to the smaller cache size after witnessing buffer overruns in the trace file when compared to the Hitachi 1TB drive.

The Nero Recode 2 benchmark is weighted to streaming read requests but is balanced by continuous write operations near the end of the test. This benchmark is one of the most demanding ones in our test suite with the disk being active the entire trace file with several 100% utilization peaks. The Seagate 7200.10 500GB results are excellent as the drive is able to process large data blocks in sequential order very efficiently.

iPEAK Game Installation Tests

Our iPEAK based Game Installation benchmarks simply show the ability of the hard drive to write data as quickly as possible to the disc based upon the installation software instructions. As detailed in our iPEAK setup description we installed the games from our source drive in order to eliminate the optical drive bottleneck. In separate application timing we witnessed basically the same percentage spread when installing the games via our DVD drive so these results are representative of actual installation performance.



The Raptors once again finish at or near the top in our gaming tests due to their rotational and random access speed advantages. From a pure performance viewpoint the Seagate 7200.10 finishes 13% behind the Hitachi 500GB drive in Battlefield 2 and is 2% quicker in Sims2.

iPEAK Game Play Tests

The iPEAK based Game Play tests are centered on the benefits of having a hard disk that can load non-linear or sequential data files quickly without interrupting the flow of the game.



When it comes to gaming the Raptors rule. Although we are looking at pure performance results, in subjective testing the Hitachi 1TB 7200rpm drive "felt" as fast as the Raptor family of drives when loading or playing a game. To be quite honest, it was difficult to tell any differences between the other 7200rpm drives although the Seagate 7200.10 500GB drive finished about 37% behind the Hitachi 500GB offering.

We need to remember our IPeak tests reflect pure hard drive performance and will be mitigated by the system platform components as we will see in our application tests.