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

Real World Tests - Application Load Times

In our Application Load Time tests, we measure the time it takes for each application to startup. For example, our benchmarking tool begins the stopwatch as soon as PhotoShopCS.exe is run and stops after the application has finished loading all of the plugins and filters and shuts down. We take the average of 3 runs with system reboots and hard disk defragmentations before each test run.

Hitachi's T7K250 came out as the winner of this round. Photoshop CS usually takes about 8-9 seconds, on average, to load its DLL's and plugins. With NCQ turned on, Photoshop CS finished these tasks 1 second quicker. This 1 second may not seem like such a big deal when it comes to loading applications, but when multitasking scenarious come into play NCQ may shave off a great deal of time.