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
Overall System Performance - SYSMark
SYSMark 2004 is divided into two separate suites: Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity. What makes SYSMark an ideal hard disk benchmark is that its scores are totals of response times, meaning that the benchmark measures how long the system takes to respond to a task (e.g. how long before a search and replace is completed after it is initiated) and sums up all such response times to generate a score. This score is generated for six total subcategories, three under Internet Content Creation and three under Office Productivity.
For the most part, SYSMark is CPU/platform bound, but we will see some variations in performance according to disk speed; at the same time, there are a couple of benchmarks within SYSMark that are heavily disk dependent.
First, we start with Internet Content Creation performance; the first category that we will deal with is 3D Content Creation. The tests that make up this benchmark are described below:
"The user renders a 3D model to a bitmap using 3ds max 5.1, while preparing web pages in Dreamweaver MX. Then the user renders a 3D animation in a vector graphics format."
Generally speaking, 3D rendering is not a disk intensive task as your system is mostly CPU bound; we see proof of this in the SYSMark performance. While keeping in mind that SYSMark is more of a CPU test than a disk test, there's still very little variation between all of the drives in this test.
Next, we have 2D Content Creation performance:
"The user uses Premiere 6.5 to create a movie from several raw input movie cuts and sound cuts and starts exporting it. While waiting on this operation, the user imports the rendered image into Photoshop 7.01, modifies it and saves the results. Once the movie is assembled, the user edits it and creates special effects using After Effects 5.5."
Here, we see that hard disk performance has a much bigger impact; the 2MB 7200RPM drives just don't cut it, with the current generation 8MB 7200RPM drives pulling close to a 10% advantage over the older drives. What is very important to note is that all three of the 8MB 7200RPM drives featured here perform about the same, lending support to the theory that current drives with similar specifications will perform similarly. Out of the bunch, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 manages to hold a small lead, with the new Raptor enjoying a slight lead over even that drive.
The Internet Content Creation suite is rounded up with a Web Publishing performance test:
"The user extracts content from an archive using WinZip 8.1. Meanwhile, he uses Flash MX to open the exported 3D vector graphics file. He modifies it by including other pictures and optimizes it for faster animation. The final movie with the special effects is then compressed using Windows Media Encoder 9 series in a format that can be broadcast over broadband Internet. The web site is given the final touches in Dreamweaver MX and the system is scanned by VirusScan 7.0."
Here, we see that performance is quite similar between all of the contenders, with the Raptors taking the slight lead and the remaining 8MB cache drives all offering similar performance.
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SoBizarre - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
<<I wonder how these drives compare to my Seagate X15?Try the link below and cry... ;)
http://storagereview.com/php/benchmark/compare_rtg...
mjz5 - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
would have been cool to see how long it takes to zip a folder with a 1000 of files..araczynski - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
i don't quite see anything about the raptors that warrant the steep price jump, i see the typical milking of the wannabes.BCinSC - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
I wonder how these drives compare to my Seagate X15?Insomniac - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Anand,Could we see some type of test that shows the impact of disk defragmenting? I know it isn't exactly a hard dive test, but it would be nice to see what, if any, performance improvement it adds and how the drives perform when "optimal". Thanks.
MIDIman - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
IMHO - This is a market that has already been taken in-depth by another very big website that has been alive for almost as long as anandtech. Redundancy is always good though.We'd definitely like to see RAID array comparisons. Its definitely a big buzz word nowadays.
Pollock - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
I really could have used this article last week in deciding whether or not the 80GB Seagate for $40 last week was fast and reliable...=(00aStrOgUy00 - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
I think this article was a bit lacking.I would have liked to see how the raptors stacked up to regular 7200RPM drives with denser platters, like the barracuda 200GB one that uses 100Gb platters, especially when the 200GB one that uses 100GB platters is stil far less expensive than either of the raptor drives.
I would also like to see RAID performance compared to the raptor drives.
AnnihilatorX - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
We missed the most important test! File copy test. Say time taken to duplicate a 1GB file. It's basic but useful for those who are always dealing with large files.People who own high end harddisks tend to be either video editing enthuaists or server-owners. The tests covered general usage but did not well covering those areas. Harddisk and CPU limiting task such as volume batch encoding of videeo to a specific codec, say Xvid or DivX might be a useful benchmark. For servers random access time is important and might as well be tested.
The tests we covered is not wrong, but fail as a target for really those would buy a high end harddisk. Common task such as surfing the net while compressing document; virus checking are basic usage of an average user, and mostly CPU limiting.
While pure file copy test are likely to be harddisk limiting. The CPU ultilisation during file transfer process also indicates how good resources saving of the controllers are and has direct peoformance impact when CPU limit comes to the scene.
Reflex - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
I want to see a 'service' test of the venders much as is now done for motherboards. Hard drives and CD/DVD drives are by far the highest points of failure in a modern PC, it is important to know what happens when your drive fails. In the past this has been a serious sore point between myself and WD, it has often taken months for them to turn around a failed drive, and due to the extreme failure rates I have had with their drives after about a year, its a serious issue.Heat would also be a good test, it is the main reason that 10k RPM drives have stayed at the high end for so long.
Murst: Most people reading this site would be using NTFS, and a few using FAT32. Under NTFS, fragmentation would not have any serious impact on performance due to properties of the file system and how it works. Unless your suggesting they test NFS and other Unix/Linux filesystems, I am not certain what other file systems you want tested. Most games are not tested under Win9x anymore, I don't see a point in testing other hardware on a 6 year old OS either...