Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ

Real World Tests - Multitasking Performance

To provide a real world example of multitasking, we use run Outlook and import 450MB of emails into an account. We then time how long it takes our benchmarking utlity to zip a single 300MB file. To compare our results, we calculate the difference between the multitasked process and the single task file zip process.

Outlook + File Zip 1 300MB File
	NCQ/TCQ Status	Multitasked	File Zip Only	% Difference
Seagate 7200.8 (NCQ)	w/out NCQ	76.688	60.245	27.3%
	w/NCQ	76.641	60.09	27.5%
Seagate 7200.7	N/A	77.947	65.188	19.6%
Hitachi 7K400	N/A	81.047	66.966	21%
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (NCQ)	w/out NCQ	68.604	60.787	12.9%
	w/NCQ	68.837	59.872	15%
Western Digital Raptor 740	w/out TCQ	68.956	59.244	16.4%
	w/TCQ
Samsung SpinPoint SP1614C	N/A	72.028	62.222	15.8%
Samsung SpinPoint SP1614N	N/A	74.532	60.321	23.6%
Samsung SpinPoint SP1604N	N/A	77.488	61.519	26%
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9	N/A	80.722	61.331	31.7%
Maxtor DiamondMax 16	N/A	94.214	74.244	26.9%

Good performance is shown by the lower percentages. While the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 performed the best out of all the drives, its NCQ performance was slightly lower than with the feature disabled.