Testing:

The tests to be executed on the drives include benchmarks from four pre-packaged applications, as well as a test of the time required for Windows 7 Professional (64-Bit) to boot up.

» Windows 7 Professional Boot Time
» PassMark Performance Test 7.0 Advanced Disk Test (64-Bit)
» PCMark Vantage x64
» Everest Ultimate Edition 5.30.2068
» AS SSD Benchmark 1.4.3704.27281

Windows 7 Professional Boot Time:

The first test to consider was see how quickly the test system would boot up in to Windows 7 Professional (64-Bit). A stop watch was started as soon as the power button was pressed to turn the system on, and it was stopped as soon as the swirly graphic disappeared from the mouse pointer on the Windows desktop. This measurement of boot time does include the BIOS post time, which obviously adds the same amount of time to each round of tests.



What we see is that the Momentus XT improved by eight seconds between the first and fifth test, which is roughly a 14% improvement. While it can't compete with the SSD in terms of boot time, it blows the 5400RPM hard drive out of the water.

PassMark Performance Test 7.0 Advanced Disk Test (64-Bit):

PassMark's Performance Test version 7.0 (64-Bit) offers a handful of 'canned' system benchmarks, but by selecting the Advanced tab you can configure some additional tests on specific components, including hard drives. For the second round of tests in this review we will see three different advanced disk tests that may simulate some real world usage, each of which provides results in units of MB/s (where higher scores are better).

The first test (entitled Database), is a 90/10 split of reads/writes, where 90% of the transactions are random. The Seagate Momentus XT did improve over time, but the results were still quite low and not much higher than the 5400RPM drive.



The second test (entitled File Server), is a 80/20 split of reads/writes, where 100% of the transactions are random. Adaptive learning could not help the Momentus XT here, as it put up the same results each time, and again they weren't that much higher than the traditional hard drive's.



The third and final test in this section (entitled Work Station), is a 70/30 split of reads/writes, where 80% of the transactions are random. Again, not much to get excited about, and the XT's SSD and learning abilities did not help much at all.