SATA II to the Power of 3.0Gb/sec: Three Drives Reviewed

Multitasking Performance - Business Winstone 2004

So far NCQ proves to be a a feature that could easily be nonexistent when running single tasks at a time. Because NCQ is a technology which is designed to handle random requests for data, the only way to efficiently test it is to throw a few applications at and running a few tasks at the same time. This will definitely give a hard drive a workout.

Business Winstone 2004 includes a multitasking test as a part of its suite, which does the following:

"This test uses the same applications as the Business Winstone test, but runs some of them in the background. The test has three segments: in the first, files copy in the background while the script runs Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer in the foreground. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the second segment. In that segment, Excel and Word operations run in the foreground while WinZip archives in the background. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the third segment. In that segment, Norton AntiVirus runs a virus check in the background while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft FrontPage, and WinZip operations run in the foreground."