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.

Business Winstone 2004

Our first benchmark shows Western Digital's WD1600JS coming in at second best in pure hard disk performance at 719 IO operations per second while the 74GB 10,000RPM Raptor still tops the charts. Hitachi's T7K250 spits out 609 IO operations per second with a 20 IO increase with NCQ turned on. Samsung's HD160JJ, on the other hand, does not do so well coming in 5th and 6th to last at 483 operations per second and 490 operations per second with NCQ on.

Let's take a look at Content Creation performance.

Business Winstone 2004

Each of the 3 competitors performs about the same in the Content Creation portion of IPEAK compared to the rest of the list.

Not surprisingly, Hitachi and Western Digital come close to topping the charts at 12.76ms and 13.24ms respectively while the HD160JJ comes close to last place at 15.516ms average read service time.

The Test Overall System Performance - Winstone 2004
Comments Locked

52 Comments

View All Comments

  • fbottone - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    Hows about adding a Maxtor SATAII (like Maxline III 300GB) drive to the mix? The SATA-I maxtors do pretty well in certain tests but I'd like to see them compared with the three very good drives already there.
  • BornStar18 - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    I'm confused by your conclusion on page 5 regarding Office Productivity. Your written statement doesn't support what I'm looking at in the graph. Does the text not refer to graph?
  • 100proof - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    Would it be possible to get an update to this review showcasing some of the real benefits of SATA II?

    It seems pointless to test these drives individually as it's fairly obvious drives set at the 7200rpm speed will not improve much for indivdual performance.. Raid Arrays are necessary to guage how much of a performance boost the added bw of SATA300 factors into results. It would also be nice to see comparisons of these new SATA II drives in raid set against similar setups of SATA 150/ATA raid arrays. This might be asking too much though...
  • olly - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    When you select "Print this article", page 3 onwards the font is too big.
  • Svenna - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    There is actually no good SATA NCQ conrollers around for the for the amd platform, yet. IMO only the new AHCI controller would be worth testing ncq on :(
  • Aenslead - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    bah... what a fiasco.
  • Googer - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    I think this says it all, Raptors are almost extinct. They need to be updated or they will die.

    The performance they show is poor when compaired to the latest 7200 drives.
  • greekfragma - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    couldnt agree more with zax7480.

    gyuz can u tell us what was wrong with nvidia driver package 6.54 and u tested with a driver that was publiced one year ago ?

    plus i like your comment at final words of the article
    '' In time, however, we should see improvements in drivers to help reach the true potentials for the new SATA standard.''

    thumbs down for this review
  • jax7480 - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    I would like to know the reason that make them install such and OLD driver for the Nvidia chipset. Driver 6.39 was released February 2004. This was the first chipset driver for Nforce 4. It was released together with Nforce 4 chipset.
    Couldn't they just DOWNLOAD a newer one? We are talking about NEW HDD drives here.
  • cryptonomicon - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    hmm, i liked this review alot because i can see the performance of alot of common drives on the market today and see their performance in comparison to each other, regardless to what SATA2 is doing.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now