| Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 200GB Hard Disk Drive - Page 3 of 6 |
Testing:
The 200GB Seagate 7200.8 Barracudas will be run through a series of synthetic and real world tests, and all of the results will be compared to the previous generation, 200GB Seagate 7200.7 Barracuda (ST3200822AS). The drives to be tested were all connected to a Promise Fastrak TX4300 SATA RAID controller, and the remainder of the test system consists of the following components:
• Intel Pentium 4 2.6C processor
• Abit IS7-G i865PE motherboard
• 1024MB PC4400 XL Corsair Dual Channel DDR Kit
• Ultra Products Xconnect 500W PSU
• Windows XP Professional SP2
• 2x 80GB Seagate 7200.7 Barracudas in RAID 1 hold operating system & benchmarks
The following drive configurations will be tested in each test listed below:
• One 200GB Seagate 7200.8 Barracuda with NCQ enabled
• One 200GB Seagate 7200.8 Barracuda with NCQ disabled
• One 200GB Seagate 7200.7 Barracuda with NCQ disabled (no NCQ support)
• Two 200GB Seagate 7200.8 Barracudas in RAID 0 (128kb chunk size) with NCQ enabled
• Two 200GB Seagate 7200.8 Barracudas in RAID 1 with NCQ enabled
The following tests will be run on the drives configured as listed above:
• HD Tach 3.0.1.0 (Quick Test)
• SiSoft Sandra 2005 (File System Benchmark)
• PC Wizard 2005 (Hard Disk Benchmark)
• Real World Test - small file transfer
• Real World Test - large file transfer
• Thermal testing
The first three tests listed above are synthetic benchmarks available in some form as a free download from the links provided. The "Real World Tests" mentioned are based on actual file transfers and consist of two stages each. The thermal testing consists of monitoring the idle and active temperatures of the hard drives outer surface. All of the tests will be described in greater detail in the specific sections.
The operating system and benchmark applications were installed on a pair of 80GB Seagate 7200.7 Barracuda drives in a RAID 1 configuration. Each drive to be tested was formatted with one NTFS partition, defragmented before testing, and the system was rebooted after the execution of each benchmark.
Testing Results:
HD Tach 3.0.1.0 (Quick Test):
HD Tach is a popular benchmark dedicated solely to the analysis of hard drive performance. It provides a few key pieces of information regarding the subject drive, and the chart below details the reported CPU usage while testing, the access time, the average read speed, and the burst (maximum) speed.
Lower values are desirable for CPU usage and access time, while higher values are better for average read speed and burst speed. It can be seen that CPU usage is minimal in any configuration, and that all but the RAID 0 results are fairly comparable across all the other sets of results. RAID 0 is expected to be faster, perhaps faster than even tested, but the other results are on par with what might be expected. The 7200.8 drives do better than the 7200.7 in burst and average read speed, but the 7200.7 managed to hold an edge in access time.
From the results it can also be seen that drive performance in HD Tach is not improved with the implementation of NCQ. Access time improved by close to two milliseconds, but otherwise the results were the same whether NCQ was enabled or disabled on the controller card. NCQ will help the overall performance of the drive, but not all uses (and therefore tests) will take advantage of this.
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