Seagate 7200.9 500GB: Mouthwatering Benchmarks
by Purav Sanghani on October 24, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Real World Tests - File System Tasks Within Drive
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.
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.
- 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. We then run the test again with 300 1MB files to see how the drive performs when working with multiple files.
- 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.
- 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.
| File System Tasks (from test bed drive to 500GB 7200.9) | ||||
| NCQ Off | NCQ On | |||
| 300MB File | 300 1MB Files | 300MB File | 300 1MB Files | |
| File Zip | 60.246 | 59.781 | 60.149 | 59.180 |
| File Unzip | 14.074 | 14.660 | 13.849 | 14.349 |
| File Copy | 5.410 | 5.801 | 5.043 | 5.473 |
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jeffrey - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I agree, the 160gb would have been a good review due to the platter density. The 400gb would have been a good review due to the combination of higher density and higher cache.A true Anandtech Quality article needs not only to be a report, but an inquisition.
Great review idea:
160gb drive 160gb platters 8mb cache
400gb drive 133gb platters 16mb cache
500gb drive 125gb platters 16mb cache
The way I see it the perfect follow-up is already 1/3 done.
Nighteye2 - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Did anyone else notices how the load times in bold print for both Word 2003 and Photoshop CS are not the minimum load times of all drives tested?Lord Zado - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Yeah, I noticed that as well. Was coming here to make that same comment.PuravSanghani - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I got a bit happy with the bold button with the Sox in the World Series! This has been fixed.Lonyo - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
It says evaluation version for non commercial use only in the SS of the HD Tach titelbar, are you guys doing osmething illegal?I'd call Anandtech a commercial venture :P
mongoosesRawesome - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Good eyes.Basilisk - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Last paragraph of article: why on Earth is "cost-effective" linked to M$ Retail Management System Solutions? Or, for that matter, why is "Western-Digital" linked to Yahoo!! Shopping (as opposed to AT Shopping) in a sentence unrelated to pricing? Curiouser and curiouser....KristopherKubicki - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
It's some ad thing called intelitext. It sucks. Click here to disable it:http://www.anandtech.com/siteinfo.aspx?intelli=y">http://www.anandtech.com/siteinfo.aspx?intelli=y
Kristopher
kd4yum - Thursday, October 27, 2005 - link
Thanks, KrisAnemone - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I've had dozens of WD drives over the years and only 2 (1 was 10+ years old, the other a 6mo old raptor) have ever gone bad. I've killed several IBM drives and a couple Maxtor's along the way.The raptor is really noticeably faster in day to day use than any other drive I've seen in action. The tests really don't tell the entire story. With several of the drives in my systems virus scans have gone from a couple hours down to 20-30min. It's really that noticeable. What I'd like to see on that front however is for WD to up the drive to 148mb, bring us a genuine native NCQ, and SATA II. The last two features just to bring it up to date, since I'm not yet convinced they make a stunning difference in performance. SATA II may be a technology that will serve better when all drives are 10k standard and raptor types are 15k, meaning when the native ability of the drive itself begins to get a bit better.
Thanks for the detailed review!