Testing (continued):
SiSoft Sandra XI SP1 (Physical Disks Benchmark):
The results shown below are taken from SiSoftware Sandra XI SP1's Physical Disks Benchmark. This benchmark provides two results that represent the performance of each drive. Lower values are desirable for the average access time, while higher values are desirable for the drive index figure.
As we saw in HD Tach, the access time on the Western Digital Scorpio once again finishes last, but again by a small margin. Of interest is that the drive index value lags behind that of the Momentus 7200.2 by just 6 MB/s, despite being capable of one half the theoretical transfer rate. It might not put up the highest number here, but the value is quite respectable and much closer than I would have anticipated.
Real World Data Transfers:
Real world testing was broken into two phases; reading files from, and writing files to the test drives. A folder containing 150 sub-folders and a total of 2400 files was used for all transfers. These files were generally small in size, and consisted of a mix of images, documents, html files, and other items that together may well represent a typical "My Documents" folder. The 750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS drive was the original location of these files for the writing tests, and was the final location for these files for the reading tests. A separate directory was used on the 750GB drive for reading and writing, and the system was rebooted after each transfer test. A handheld stop watch was used to record the time it took to complete each transfer, and these values were used to calculate the effective data transfer rate.
The chart below summarizes the results, and higher values are better.
As with each previous test, the Western Digital Scorpio easily outperforms either PATA challenger, but the battle is much closer with the 3 Gbps Seagate Momentus 7200.2.
The Momentus 7200.2 is about 40% faster at writing files than the Western Digital Scorpio, but the margin of victory is a mere 2% at reading files. The SATA 3 Gbps transfer rate didn't help the Seagate drive blow away the Scorpio until it came to real world write testing. 40% is a large margin, and Western Digital should take a serious look at getting up to speed by offering the Scorpio as a 3 Gbps drive.
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