Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ

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.