Hardware Setup

Standard Test Bed
Playback of iPEAK Trace Files and Test Application Results
Processor Intel QX6700 - 2.66GHz Quad Core
Motherboard DFI Infinity 965-S
RAM 2 x 1GB OCZ Reaper PC2-9200
Settings - DDR2-800, 3-4-3-9
OS Hard Drive 1 x Western Digital WD1500 Raptor - 150GB
System Platform Drivers Intel 8.1.1.1010
Intel Matrix RAID 6.2.1.1002
Video Card 1 x MSI 8800GTX
Video Drivers NVIDIA Forceware 158.19
Optical Drive Plextor PX-760A, Plextor PX-B900A
Cooling Tuniq 120
Power Supply Corsair HX620W
Case Cooler Master CM Stacker 830
Operating System Windows XP Professional SP2

We are utilizing an Intel QX6700 quad core CPU to ensure we are not CPU limited in our testing. A 2GB memory configuration is standard in our XP test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of RAM. Our choice of high-range OCZ Flex XLC PC2-9200 memory offers a very wide range of memory settings with timings of 3-4-3-9 used for our benchmark results. The Corsair HX620W power supply is utilized to ensure our power supply is seen and basically not heard during testing.

Our test bed now includes a water-cooled MSI 8800 GTX video card to make sure our game tests are not completely GPU bound and to reduce noise/heat levels. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 and High Quality settings for storage reviews. All of our tests are run in an enclosed case with a dual optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. Windows XP SP2 is fully updated and we load a clean drive image for each system to keep driver conflicts to a minimum.

The drive is formatted before each test run and five tests are completed on each drive in order to produce consistent benchmark results. The two high and low scores are removed with the remaining score representing our reported result. We utilize the Intel ICH8R SATA ports along with the latest Intel Matrix Storage driver to guarantee consistency in our playback results when utilizing NCQ, TCQ, or RAID settings. The Windows XP swap file is set to a static 2048MB and we clean the prefetch folder after each benchmark.

Software Test Suite

With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we needed a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. While we will continue to utilize HD Tach, HD Tune, and PCMark05 for comparative benchmarks our logical choice for application benchmarking is the Intel iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit version 3. The iPEAK tests can be designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case we keep the host adapter consistent while varying the hard drive models.

We utilize the iPEAK WinTrace32 program to record precise I/O operations when running real world benchmarks. We then utilize the iPEAK AnalyzeTrace program to review the disk trace file for integrity and ensure our trace files have properly captured the activities we require. Intel's RankDisk utility is used to play back the workload of all I/O operations that took place during the recording.

RankDisk generates results in a mean service time in milliseconds format; in other words, it gives the average time that each drive took to fulfill each I/O operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance in all of our iPEAK results. While these measurements will provide a score representing "pure" hard drive performance, the actual impact on real world applications can and will be different due to system factors.

Our iPEAK tests represent a fairly extensive cross-section of applications and usage patterns for both the general and enthusiast user. We will tailor these benchmarks with an eye towards the drive's intended usage and feature set when compared to similar drives. Hopefully our comments in the results sections will offer proper guidance for making a purchasing decision in these situations. Our iPEAK Test Suite consists of the following benchmarks.

VeriTest Business Winstone 2004 - trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Microsoft Office XP, WinZip 8.1, and Norton Antivirus 2003.

VeriTest Multimedia Content Creation 2004 - trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Adobe Photoshop 7.01, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0, Newtek Lightwave 3D 7.5b, and others.

AVG Antivirus 7.5 - trace file of a complete antivirus scan on our test bed hard drive.

Microsoft Disk Defragmenter - trace file of the complete defragmentation process after the operating system and all applications were installed on our test bed hard drive.

WinRAR 3.70 - trace file of creating a single compressed folder consisting of 444 files in 10 different folders totaling 602MB.

AnyDVD 6.1 - trace file of the time it takes to "rip" the Office Space DVD. We first copy the entire DVD over to our source drives, defragment the drive, and then measure the time it takes for AnyDVD to "rip" the contents to our test drive. While this is not ideal, it does remove the optical drive as a potential bottleneck during the extraction process and allows us to track the write performance of the drive.

Nero Recode 2 - trace file of the time it takes to shrink the entire Office Space DVD that was extracted in the AnyDVD process into a single 4.5GB DVD image.

Game Installation - individual trace files of the time it takes to install Sims 2 and Battlefield 2. We copy each DVD to our secondary test drives, defragment the drive, and then install each game to our source drive.

Game Play - individual trace files that capture the startup and about 15 minutes of game play in each game. The Sims 2 trace file consists of the time it takes to select a pre-configured character, setup a university, downtown, business from each expansion pack (pre-loaded), and then visit each section before returning home. Our final trace file utilizes Battlefield 2 and we play the Daqing Oilfield map in both single and multiplayer mode.

Drive Specifications HD Tune / HD Tach for your pleasure
Comments Locked

37 Comments

View All Comments

  • bigpow - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    signs of times..

    when we no longer perceived Made in China as a bad thing, I've been hearing that it's actually preferred over the recent streams of Made in Thailand electronics.

    It happened to Japan & Taiwan before, now most people are happy to see those labels when they buy something.

    And of course, the cool-er things in life are still Made in USA ;)

    -Not that where something is produced has anything to do with the quality.
  • Googer - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    I noticed the Western Digital Raptor 150 was missing from this chart:

    http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/wd750_080807108...">http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/wd750_080807108...
  • Gary Key - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    I have no idea why, but after hitting our engine update button again, it is there now. :)
  • Googer - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    In your benchmarking, you did not mention the size of the swapfile you have your OS set to use. I am sure it has an effect on application throughput. A static sized file is needed for benchmarking consistency.
  • Gary Key - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    Our standard swapfile is fixed at 2048MB and we clean the prefetch folder after each benchmark run.
  • imaheadcase - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    You can fill a WHS with 6 1TB drives for so cheap it will be great! Acoustics and heat will be a selling point for lots of people what that comes around.
  • yyrkoon - Monday, August 13, 2007 - link

    Heh, have you ever owned a 'Deathstar' ? Many, including myself will never venture down that road again.
  • Martimus - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link

    I have avoided IBM drives after mine died on me after only about one year. Of course Hitachi bought them out, but I don't know if they have any better longevity than they used to.
  • strikeback03 - Tuesday, August 14, 2007 - link

    An Emachines computer I bought a few years ago had a Deskstar drive. Other than the anti-static meowing noise, no problems with it for the 3 years I owned it.
  • mostlyprudent - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    I am most impressed at how well the Hitachi 1TB drive continues to sit at the top of so many of the benchmarks.

    Your conclusion stating how well the WD drive does against the Seagate omitted the point raised in the Samsung article recently posted here. That is, Seagate's drive is almost a year older and their new 7200.11 drives are just around the corner.

    Overall, it is impressive to see how tightly grouped these drive are. There seems very little reason to even consider a Raptor anymore.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now