Q2 2004 Desktop Hard Drive Comparison: WD Raptor vs the World
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 7, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Pure Hard Disk Performance
Although the point of our test suite is to focus on real world performance, it is useful to look at some theoretical numbers in order to get an idea of drive superiority.
To measure "pure" hard disk performance, we took a real world benchmark - in this case, the entire Winstone 2004 suite - and used Intel's IPEAK utility to capture a trace file of all of the IO operations that take place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. We then use IPEAK to play back the trace, much like a timedemo, on each of the hard drives, which gives us a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the average time that each drive took to fulfill each IO operation.
In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of IO operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance.
Keep in mind that these performance scores are best only for comparing pure hard disk performance, and in no way do they reflect the actual real world performance impact of these hard drives.
For descriptions of what the Business and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests consist of, reference those benchmark pages.
We see from the Business Winstone IPEAK scores that the two Raptor drives are, by far, the highest performers out of the bunch.
As our focus shifts down to the 7200RPM 8MB cache drives, we see that they all offer similar performance. In this case, the Western Digital WD1200JB and the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 offer basically identical performance. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 falls behind somewhat, but what matters most is how these drives perform in the real world.
Looking at the older IBM 75GXP and Maxtor D740X drives, it's interesting to see that the fastest drives of today are around twice as fast as the fastest drives from a few years ago.
As we look at Multimedia Content Creation IPEAK performance, we see that the two Raptors continue to maintain a significant performance advantage over the competition. There is a bit of place switching as the Seagate 7200.7 and WD 1200JB perform much closer, with the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 holding a bit of a lead.
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T8000 - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
One point I did not see in the review was the partition information.This may be important, because smaller partitions usually perform better, because of their smaller allocation table and possibly even a smaller cluster size.
It would be best to use a drive image that fits on all drives and load it on each drive for testing, to make sure smaller drives are not given an advantage over bigger drives and fragmentation is the same for all drives.
Did you use this method?
broberts - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
It would be nice if you included the actual model numbers of the tested drives.Perhaps I'm missing something but ISTM that comparing benchmarks of SATA drives against those running at PATA-100 is questionable. Especially since most of the numbers reported are within 5% of each other. Why weren't SATA models of the 8MB/7200 drives used?
jrphoenix - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
I have submitted my request to Anand. I would like to see the new Seagate and Hitachi drives. The new 7200 rpm Seagates (shipping this month) support NCQ and are supposedly quicker than the raptors at a lower price!!! :)Crassus - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Anand,I would have liked to see also the performance of 2 Raptors of both generations in RAID 0, at least with the integrated controllers (ICH5 etc.).
Nighteye2 - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
It's good to see this test, but why are the raptors the only SATA drives? It would be good to add in a SATA WD 7200 RPM 8 MB drive (80 GB, 120 GB, or another size)trexpesto - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Since with buying technology part of the equation is how long to hold off, it would be cool to get a head's up on stuff in the pipeline like the NCQ/TCQ drives.http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/relea...
Apologiliac - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
I was startled how quiet the seagate was, because i was wating for it to turn on (?...!) I was also laughing out loud after the new raptor played because it immediately followed by gangsters paradise by weird al on my playlist :pdeathwalker - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
I am somewhat dissapointed that this review did not include at least a couple of competing SATA drives...such as maybe a Seagate and Maxtor drive. The majority of the community already assumes the advantages of SATA over PATA!!Blain - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
A 75GXP? You gotta be kiddin'Why not run the other drives against a new Hitachi?
For crying out loud! :o
Z80 - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Your review was right on target for my needs. I was considering upgrading my 120GB Maxtor to a new WD 74GB Raptor. Looks like I can save my money now or spend it on an upgrade that gives more bang for the buck. Thanks