Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ

Real World Tests - File System Tasks

Synthetic benchmarks are not always the best gauge in measuring the "real" performance of hardware, which is why we have incorporated a few real world tests in our storage reviews. One of our tests, the file system performance test, measures the drive's ability to handle file zip, unzip, and copy operations. This is a great measure of how one drive compares to another and we have put together a group of tasks that most of us typically use.

1. File Zip Test - We take a 300MB file and measure the time that it takes for our test bed to compress it to ZIP format on our test drive. We then run the test again with 300 1MB files to see how the drive performs when working with multiple files.
2. File Unzip Test - Using the same methodology as the File Zip Test, we take a ZIP file of a single 300MB file as well as a ZIP file of 300 1MB files and measure the time that it takes to uncompress each ZIP successfully.
3. File Copy Test - We measure how long it takes for the system with our test drive to copy a single 300MB file as well as 300 1MB files to a separate folder on the hard drive.

Take a look at the results...

Our numbers were extremely consistent for the most part when running these real world tasks. We did have some trouble at the beginning with numbers being a bit too far apart to get an accurate average, but we fixed the issue by including reboots and defragments after every run of the tests. These tests show just how differently the file system acts with files during various tasks.