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
Final Words
The importance of this review, the reviews to come and our new HDD test suite in general is that we are finally able to bring real world hard drive performance numbers to you all. So, what do our real world performance tests show us?
They show us that, for the most part, all of the current generation 7200RPM 8MB cache drives perform about the same. Although there are much more significant differences between the three current-gen contenders here in the synthetic tests, in the real world, we see that they all perform just about the same.
Our tests have also shown us that the 10,000RPM Raptor can offer a noticeable, but not dramatic, performance improvement over the current generation 7200RPM 8MB cache drives. While the performance improvement is there, it's not as significant as the synthetic tests would have you believe.
More importantly than all of this is the fact that our tests have shown the true age of older 2MB cache drives. The 75GXP, once the most popular drive around, is definitely showing its age and the performance of the even newer Maxtor D740X-6L isn't that far off. If you're still running an older drive, you will see a performance improvement by going to even one of the current generation 7200RPM 8MB cache drives. It is all too often that we look at hard drives as capacities alone, but while a 80GB drive may be suiting your needs just fine an upgrade to a newer 120+ GB drive will give you more space and a performance boost to match. The thing to keep in mind is that the more up-to-date you keep your hard drive performance, the faster your system will feel and the more performance you'll get out of every upgrade of your CPU, motherboard, chipset, etc.
With our new test suite, we are committed to bringing you reviews of any drive that's available. All we ask is that you give us feedback. If you'd like to see a drive reviewed, let us know and we'll do our best to get it reviewed under the new test suite. We're going to be focusing on IDE/SATA drives first, but we will definitely move to include SCSI drives as well as controllers in the very near future. All you need to do is drop us a line and tell us what you'd like to see.
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SignalPST - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Great review, I must say. But one thing that would certainly interest alot of people including myself would be using RAID. We know that using multiple hard drives in a RAID array is very popular among gamers and almost every motherboard out now supports RAID as well. I'm sure it'll be quite interesting to see 4 of 74GB Raptors in RAID 0 in future reviews! It would also be interesting to see the different effects of stripe sizes configurations.Doormat - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
What about putting some meta-data in there? Like current street price, length of warranty, etc. Also temperature would be nice.I'd kinda like to see some RAID tests too, I'm looking at RAID 5 for a bunch big drives for a video on demand system.
Speaking of, a big-drive comparison would be cool too. Where's that hitachi 400GB drive they announced a while ago?
Murst - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Hmm,well, I'm pretty sure that there should be a significant difference in system performance when your system runs out of RAM. When virtual memory takes over, I have seen the performance of my computer drop significantly. I was hoping that a benchmark could be made showing just how large of a difference could be seen when virtual memory is a significant source of data for program execution. There should be a noticable difference in this performance between different drives.
Also, it would be interesting to know if the file system on a drive makes a difference in performance. I have a feeling that if it does, it would be unnoticable, but nevertheless, unless its tested, we would never know for sure. I don't neccessairly mean the type of file system, either. Just as RAM can have different latency settings, so can a hard drive have different block sizes (and optimal block sizes).
Again, I'm not positive if this would make a difference in performance, but I'm just trying to think of practical tests for hard drive performance.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Murst,Sorry, the last response must've been posted at the same time as yours :)
Both the Winstone and SYSMark tests use multiple applications running at the same time, but I do understand the point you're trying to make.
We do have a synthetic test that shows the benefit of defragging a hard drive, but I have yet to do significant investigation in to how that affects performance between drives other than it reduces it.
Take care,
Anand
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Must,The drives being tested are secondary drives only for the game loading tests and the theoretical IPEAK tests. The remaining Winstone and SYSMark tests all use the drive as the only drive in the system.
Take care,
Anand
Murst - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Hmm... let me clarify that. I believe that all of your tests were probably ran with no other programs executing. It would be interesting to see the difference in performance when a lot of page swapping is occurring (ie, fill up the page table by executing other programs and then run a benchmark).Oh, and I just thought of another issue... why not have a benchmark which evaluates a drop in performance of a drive with data that is, say, 60% fragmented as compared to mostly unfragmented data.
Murst - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Its nice to see a hard drive comparison. I will be building a new comp soon and I always wondered if I'd see a difference between drives.I do, however, have one concern. It seems like the drives you used were secondary drives in the system, with the operating system working off a different drive. I have always assumed that the largest benefit of choosing a very fast drive was to minimize the access and read times of a page fault (as I generally do not spend much time at all waiting for something to load). It would seem that none of your tests take this into consideration.
Thanks
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
#1 - You're correct, the mentions of command queuing were leftover from some early tests on a new SATA controller with support for the feature. Those tests didn't make it into the article, and I've updated it accordingly.Take care,
Anand
jliechty - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
#1 - I was under that assumption also. I do recall hearing of a controller chip that supported TCQ being in the works (or perhaps already available), but the question remains whether that chip has been put in any controllers that are on the market at this time?Anyway, I'm glad that my preciousss... er... my Raptor didn't do too badly, though for what I do I probably could have kept my old WD Caviar Special Edition and not noticed much of a difference, except for my wallet being heavier. :-(
RyanVM - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Doesn't the WD74GD require a controller which supports command queuing in order for that feature to be of actual use? And I was under the impression that no current SATA controllers support that function.