SATA II to the Power of 3.0Gb/sec: Three Drives Reviewed

Pure Hard Disk Performance - IPEAK

We begin our usual hard disk drive test session with Intel's IPEAK benchmarking utility. We first run a trace capture on Winstone 2004's Business and Multimedia Content Creation benchmark runs to catch all of the IO operations that take place during each test. We then play each capture back using RankDisk which reports back to us a mean service time, or average time the drive takes to complete an IO operation.

Our first benchmark shows Western Digital's WD1600JS coming in at second best in pure hard disk performance at 719 IO operations per second while the 74GB 10,000RPM Raptor still tops the charts. Hitachi's T7K250 spits out 609 IO operations per second with a 20 IO increase with NCQ turned on. Samsung's HD160JJ, on the other hand, does not do so well coming in 5th and 6th to last at 483 operations per second and 490 operations per second with NCQ on.

Let's take a look at Content Creation performance.

Each of the 3 competitors performs about the same in the Content Creation portion of IPEAK compared to the rest of the list.

Not surprisingly, Hitachi and Western Digital come close to topping the charts at 12.76ms and 13.24ms respectively while the HD160JJ comes close to last place at 15.516ms average read service time.