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
SYSMark Performance Summary
The overall SYSMark scores summarize what we've seen thus far:
As a recap, here's what happens with the Internet Content Creation suite:
"In this scenario, the content creator creates a product-related website targeting a broadband and narrowband audience. The user first renders a 3D model to a bitmap, while preparing web pages using a web site publishing tool. The user opens a video editing package, creates 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 an image-processing package, modifies it and saves the results. Back in the 3D modeling software, the user modifies a 3D model and exports it to a vector-graphics format. Once the movie is assembled, the user edits it and creates special effects using one of the modified images as input. The user extracts content from an archive. Meanwhile, he uses an animation creation tool 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 in a format that can be broadcast over broadband Internet. The web site is given the final touches and the system is scanned for viruses."
In the Internet Content Creation tests, we see that although there is a difference in performance between current and previous generation hard drives, there's very little that separates the 10,000RPM Raptors from the 7200RPM drives.
Also recapping, here's what happens in the entire Office Productivity suite:
"In this scenario, the office productivity user creates a marketing presentation and supporting documents for a new product. The user receives email containing a collection of documents in a compressed file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while a virus checking software scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed and the user begins creating the collateral documents. The user also accesses a database and runs some queries. A collection of documents are compressed. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet and used to generate graphical charts. The user then transcribes a document. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution. The user edits and adds elements to a slide show template. Finally, the user looks at the results of his work (both the slide show and the portable document) in an Internet browser. "
Office Productivity paints a much different picture, with significant advantages being seen over older drives. The Office Productivity suite also paints a much more compelling picture of the Raptors' performance; even the older Raptor manages to maintain a decent performance advantage over the cream of the crop 7200RPM 8MB Parallel ATA drives.
Overall performance is an average of the two suites, and thus, we see that a lot of the impressive performance gains in Office Productivity are diluted by the relatively little variation in Internet Content Creation 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...