Testing (continued):
SiSoft Sandra File System Benchmark - The next set of results were collected from the "File System Benchmark" of SiSoft Sandra 2005. This benchmark provides several results, and a handful were charted to represent the performance of each drive configuration. The "Buffered Read" and "Buffered Write" values were chosen since the next benchmark (PC Wizard 2005) also uses these values, and it may be of interest to compare the two sets of results. Lower values are desirable for the average access time, while higher values are better for buffered read, buffered write, and burst speed.
In this benchmark, the RAID 0 array does quite well in 'Drive Index' and 'Buffered Write', but there is the 7200.9 Barracuda up there with some solid numbers, as well. The Hitachi and the Seagate SATA 3 Gb/s 500GB drives are fairly close to each other in this test, and they seem to split the results that were of most interest to me.
PC Wizard 2005 Hard Disk Benchmark - PC Wizard is a lesser known application featuring a suite of benchmarking modules that can quickly provide some information about your computer's performance. The hard disk benchmark module provides a quick test on a drive's sequential read, sequential write, buffered read, and buffered write capabilities. The chart below summarizes the details of this round of testing, and higher values are better in all results.
Again we see the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 doing exceptionally well, especially in the buffered read and write categories.
When the testing started, I assumed we would be comparing apples to apples with the 500GB SATA 3 Gb/s drives with 16MB cache from Seagate and Hitachi, but it doesn't appear to be that way by analyzing the test results so far.
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