Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ
by Purav Sanghani on April 20, 2005 4:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Real World Tests - Application Load Times
In our Application Load Time tests, we measure the time that it takes for each application to start up. For example, our benchmarking tool begins the stopwatch as soon as PhotoShopCS.exe is run, stops after the application has finished loading all of the plugins and filters, and shuts down. We take the average of 3 runs with system reboots and hard disk defragmentations before each test run.Application Load Times (average, seconds) |
|||||||
NCQ/TCQ Status |
PhotoShop CS |
Word 2003 |
Excel 2003 |
Access 2003 |
PowerPoint 2003 |
Winner |
|
| Seagate 7200.8 (NCQ) |
w/out NCQ |
7.902 |
2.216 |
2.084 |
2.709 |
2.673 |
|
w/NCQ |
6.203 |
1.836 |
1.918 |
1.938 |
1.969 |
3 |
|
| Seagate 7200.7 | N/A |
8.006 |
2.644 |
2.084 |
2.709 |
2.673 |
|
| Hitachi 7K400 | N/A |
6.375 |
1.788 |
1.281 |
2.259 |
2.530 |
|
| Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (NCQ) |
w/out NCQ |
||||||
w/NCQ |
7.278 |
1.748 |
1.572 |
1.683 |
1.754 |
2 |
|
| Western Digital Raptor 740 | w/out TCQ |
8.012 |
2.526 |
1.604 |
2.483 |
2.663 |
|
w/TCQ |
6.067 |
1.651 |
1.495 |
1.513 |
1.491 |
X |
|
| Samsung SpinPoint SP1614C | N/A |
6.763 |
2.191 |
2.634 |
2.374 |
2.222 |
|
| Samsung SpinPoint SP1614N | N/A |
7.311 |
2.040 |
2.189 |
2.449 |
2.090 |
|
| Samsung SpinPoint SP1604N | N/A |
7.596 |
2.466 |
2.437 |
2.855 |
2.817 |
|
| Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 | N/A |
8.263 |
1.984 |
2.323 |
1.662 |
2.289 |
|
| Maxtor DiamondMax 16 | N/A |
9.266 |
3.355 |
2.979 |
3.816 |
3.823 |
|
Since this is the first time that we are using the Application Load Time test, we are happy to see the results for each of the 3 test runs to be consistent. We performed a disk defragmentation and a reboot before each run for each application. Though time consuming, this process is necessary to attain accurate results of the performance of each hard disk drive.
Each of the drives that feature either Native Command Queuing or Tagged Command Queuing shows a good amount of increase in performance with command queuing turned on. It's not a surprise that the Raptor outperforms all of the drives on the list in Application Load Times as well. The 7200.8 comes in at the 3rd quickest drive in these tests.
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PuravSanghani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
mjz5: With our nForce4 platform there is an option under the drive controllers options tab called "Enable command queuing". By checking this option and restarting the system, command queuing will be enabled. Some boards, however, enable NCQ/TCQ by default through the BIOS. You may want to check with your motherboard manual on that.Take care,
Purav
mjz5 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Nighteye2 has a good question. How does NCQ work with RAID arrays? Is it better, worse???How would I know if TCQ is enabled on my 74 raptor?
xsilver - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
#21 LOL --- you wouldnt want that space anyways even if it was there.... its cant be guaranteed reliable so would you trust 100gb's of your drive that could die at any moment???quorm - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
I have one of the 300gb 7200.8 drives. It's mentioned in the article that all of the 7200.8 drives use a 3x133gb platter configuration. I was wondering if there is any hack to allow access to the remaining 100gb of disk space. Anyone?AtaStrumf - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Hey, where did all the WD drives (apart from Raptor obviously) go??? I can get a 200 GB PATA model pretty cheap, so I'm seriously considering it. Any advice anyone?n7 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Thanx for the review guys :)flatblastard: I'd agree.
The Raptors may not win all the benches, but i find they feel so much snappier than my other 7200RPM drives.
I certainly wouldn't mind adding a 400 Gb Seagate to my collection though :)
bob661 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Can you guys post a UT2004 for load time graph please.flatblastard - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
I'm using the raptor for my OS, and the 250GB seagate 7200.8 for everything else. I really can't tell which one is faster at loading games...but the raptor is MUCH quicker loading anything else.Icehawk - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Where were the heavier real-world multi-tasking tests like in the Intel DC previews? In those articles it appeared that NCQ offered some performance boost in heavy I/O situations - here it seems to offer zero benefit.Houdani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
I dunno. Neither the Seagate nor the Maxtor NCQ drive really impressed me. They didn't stand out from the peleton. For most performance needs, I'd have to give the yellow jersey to the Raptor, although the idle heat is a noteworthy ding.For extra capacity one of the larger models would be prudent, but for a primary drive the Raptor is fairly impressive.