WinBench 99 - Transfer Rate Test

We ran WinBench 99's Disk Transfer Rate Test to get a better measure of just how well the transfer rates are over the course of the entire disk. The Disk Transfer Rate test reads from the media in a linear fashion from the beginning (first track) to the end (last track). The numbers below represent the ceiling and floor of the transfer rates throughout the test.

Seagate 500GB 7200.9


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Hitachi 7K500


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Western Digital WD4000YR


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As we saw during our first look at the 500GB 7200.9, the drive started its read at just under 64MB/sec and ended at about 32MB/sec on the inside of the platter. The WD4000YR started its read just above the 64MB/sec mark and ended at a quicker 38MB/sec rate. The 7K500's read began similarly at just above 64MB/sec, but ended much lower at about 30.5MB/sec. The WD4000YR and 7K500's read method differed as the drive stepped down after covering certain parts of the disk while the 500GB 7200.9 drive had a steadier decrease in read speed.

Pure Hard Disk Performance - IPEAK HDTach – Sequential Read Speed/Burst Speed
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  • Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    quote:

    Kinda reminds me of AGP... or PCI... or pretty much most of the standards these days getting replaced by "better faster must have!" standards that cost the end user money and offer no real improvement in performance.


    I can understand mentioning AGP, but PCI? You gotta be kidding me... that bus is such a bottleneck. You dont even have to run PCI cards to find out, just stress all the on-board stuff on a feature rich mobo and you'll notice it too.
  • Cygni - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    Which explains the rush from the mfts to get PCI-Ex cards out the door. :p Really, the only 2 cards that i can see benifiting from the PCI Express bus are high level RAID cards and gigabit ethernet... both of which are being fully integrated into southbridges anyway.
  • Hikari - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    You said AGP and PCI, not AGP and PCIe. Obviously there isn't a lot of difference between the latter, but there is quite a bit of difference between the former.
  • Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    They are integrated into southbridge and still utilize the PCI bus mostly. PCI bus aint only the slot you see on your mobo, you know..
  • Anton74 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    High level RAID? A single PATA drive has an interface speed identical to that of the PCI bus (133MB/s) these days, all by itself. And then there's SATA with 150MB/s and 300MB/s interface speeds now. Not to mention the PCI bus is usually shared with a multitude of devices, all wanting some bandwidth.
  • puffpio - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    It seems anomalous that the Western Digital Raptor 10000RPM drive is sooo much slower in the Doom 3 level load test compared to all the other drives. It sticks out like a sore thumb. It doesn't make sense because it had been dominating the other tests...

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