Testing:
The hard drive was put through a series of real world and synthetic benchmarks in order to gauge its performance. The list below summarizes the five tests executed...
• HD Tach 3.0.1.0 Long Benchmark
• SiSoft Sandra 2005 File System Benchmark
• PC Wizard 2005 Hard Disk Benchmark
• Real World File Transfers
• Thermal Testing
• Bonus Testing?
As mentioned previously, the operating system used during testing was Windows XP Professional, 64-Bit Edition. The nForce4 motherboard drivers used were version 6.69, and Windows XP 64-Bit updates were current through November 07, 2005. It should be noted that of the three synthetic benchmarks, only SiSoft Sandra 2005 is available as a 64-Bit application. HD Tach and PC Wizard are both 32-Bit, but run just fine on 64-Bit Windows.
As a point of comparison, several other drives were tested along side the 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9, and all are listed below...
• 500GB 7200.9 Seagate Barracuda SATA 3 Gb/s (16MB cache memory)
• 500GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA 3 Gb/s (16MB cache memory)
• 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA 1.5 Gb/s (16MB cache memory)
• 200GB 7200.8 Seagate Barracuda SATA 1.5 Gb/s (8MB cache memory)
• 2x200GB 7200.8 Seagate Barracuda SATA 1.5 Gb/s (in RAID 0)
As mentioned much earlier, we of course have the 500GB SATA 3 Gb/s drive Hitachi provided for review. In addition we have a couple SATA-I drives, as well as a RAID 0 array of SATA-I drives. The results should provide a good cross section of high performance desktop configurations.
HD Tach 3.0.1.0 Long Benchmark - HD Tach is a simple benchmark focused on hard drive performance. It provides information regarding the drive being tested, including: CPU usage while testing, access time, average read speed, and the burst (maximum) speed. The chart below details the results for the 'Long' version of this benchmark, and it should be noted that lower values are desirable for CPU usage and access time, while higher values are better for average read speed and burst speed.
Taking a look at the burst results honestly made me say "WOW"! The Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 not only outscored the RAID 0 array of SATA 1.5 Gb/s drives, but it also blew away the Hitachi SATA 3 Gb/s 500Gb drive by over 20 MB/s. Taking a look at the other results from this benchmark show that all of the drives are just about equal, and that the burst is the only place a major advantage will be had.
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