The Test


Our test bed specs have been laid out below. Since our test bed has remained untouched from our look at Seagate's 400GB Barracuda article we will include our results of the drives we looked at from that article.

Our test bed:

AMD Athlon64 3500+ (2.2Ghz)
Giga-byte GA-K8NXP-SLI
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 3Gbps/sec SATA transfer rates, and NCQ and TCQ.

We used the following nForce platform drivers in conjunction with our testbed:

nForce4 Chipset Driver 6.39
Nvidia Forceware 71.89
Windows XP SP2 w/out further updates

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.

SYSMark 2004 - the official SYSMark 2004 test suite.

Business Winstone 2004 - the official Business Winstone 2004 test suite.

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 - the official Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test suite.

Half-Life 2 Level Load Test - a timed test of loading a level in Half-Life 2.

Doom 3 Level Load Test - a timed test of loading a level in Doom 3.

Command & Conquer: Generals Level Load Test - a timed test of loading a level in Command & Conquer: Generals.

Real World File System Task Tests - timed tests of basic file system tasks including zipping/unzipping and copying files

Service Time and Transfer Rate Tests - Synthetic tests for average service time and transfer rate of hard disk at the beginning and the end of a full disk read. We have included the WinBench test, but since it is synthetic, we have not put much emphasis on it.

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.


The Competition

Max Capacity
Platter Density
# of Platters/Heads
Spindle speed
(RPM)
Average Seek Time
Average Latency
Interface
Buffer Size
Samsung HD160JJ
160GB
80GB
2/4
7200
8.9ms
4.17ms
SATA II
8MB
Western Digital WD1600JS
160GB
80GB
2/4
7200
8.9ms
4.20ms
SATA II
8MB
Hitachi T7K250
160GB
125GB
2/3
7200
8.5ms
4.17ms
SATA II
8MB

Index Pure Hard Disk Performance - Intel IPEAK
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  • bersl2 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    And I need to learn to refresh.
  • bersl2 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    ---quote---
    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 15000RPM Raptor still tops the charts.
    ---quote---

    Um... did I miss something? Aren't Raptors 10k in RPMs?
  • mechBgon - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Typo on page 3 referring to a 15000rpm Ratpro. They wish :D

    ...errr, 10th post!
  • cryptonomicon - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    eh, a few minutes ago, the review showed up but when i clicky, it goes to search review panel.
  • GhandiInstinct - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    No graphs on some pages still.
  • GhandiInstinct - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Haha!
  • PuravSanghani - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    When our publisher is away, with HTML we get to play!

    Sorry about that guys...everything should be good now. Do let us know if you see anything odd though.

    Thanks for stopping by!

    Purav
  • pastorjay - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    If I remember right, Wes said that their HTML coder was gone and they were doing all their own coding.
  • Krk3561 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    graphs wont work for me either
  • ChiefNutz - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Never mind.

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