Testing (continued):

Everest Ultimate Edition 5.50.2100:

The Everest utility has both a read and write benchmark, but because the write portion wipes any data on the test drive, we have chosen not to run it here. The read suite of tests looks at linear read speeds at both a beginning, middle, and end point. For our purposes we will skip the mid-point results, mostly because the numbers were virtually identical to the end results.

In the graph below we see the beginning figures for the read test. As you will notice all three drives are with in 500k of each other.



But as we move to a long sustained read the Toshiba drive starts to lose ground as much as 10MB/sec.



The next set of graphs deal with random reads (first chart below) and buffered reads (second chart below). Once again, just as we saw at the end of the sustained read, this test shows how the Toshiba drive can't keep up with the Seagate and Western Digital drives, with the Seagate finishing with a slight performance gain.



In the buffered read graph, we see that all 3 drives are just about on par with each other - each right in the 34MB/s range. This makes perfect sense as all three devices carry 8MB of cache.



The last portion of the Everest Read Suite examines the average read time. In this graph you can see that access time appears to be proportional to the size of the physical drive as all three devices have the same amount of cache and the same 5400rpm spindle speed.