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 (continued)
SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:
"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."
The Communication test tends to be very disk dependent and thus, we see significant differences between the drives. The advantage of a larger cache is evident, as the newer 7200RPM drives hold at least a 10% performance advantage over the older drives.
This test also shows a significant performance advantage for the Raptors. This is the first test in our suite that shows a substantial difference between the first and second generation Raptors, with the new Raptor outpacing the old one by 11%. The new Raptor also manages to offer a 27% performance advantage over the fastest 7200RPM drive in this comparison. What is very important about this advantage is that it is a 27% advantage, not in a disk only test, but in a real world test. Any situation where a drive is able to increase overall system performance by 27% is one that demands attention, especially if it isn't an unusual situation; in this case, it very much isn't.
The next test is Document Creation performance, which shows very little difference in drive performance between the contenders:
"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."
The biggest difference here is less than 5%, so there's not too much to talk about. The drives' impact on performance is basically negligible.
The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:
"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."
Although you would think that Data Analysis would show significant differences in drive performance, this particular test still isn't as disk bound as the Communication test. The performance spread here is 5%.
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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...