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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Googer - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Once again NCQ did not aide these drives to deliver higher performance. It is my speculation that we will need an Operating System that can take advantage of NCQ before we could see any performance gains from it. Untill then Keep it disabled.KristopherKubicki - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
NCQ is very vendor specific. Some drives benefit more than others from it.Kristopher
PuravSanghani - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
NCQ is actually beneficial in server applications where disk requests are occuring very frequently as opposed to a desktop PC scenario where disk access is not as critical.We are trying to research ways to benchmark this but if any of you have any suggestions, please feel free to send an email with any ideas you have.
Thanks,
Purav
Byte - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
with an icredible 5 year warranty i exclusively use seagate. Suprisingly i've never had a chance to test out Seagates replacement steps. I've returned dozens of WDs, Maxtors, and IBMs. Looks like seagates on a role.Griswold - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Such is life. I've seen quite a few Seagates die, yet, never had a problem with WD in more than 10 years of using them.One persons experience is hardly statistically correct. :)
DrZoidberg - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I own a 200gig Seagate 7200.7 SATA, and though the synthetic benchmarks like Winstone, Sysmark, Seagate is like at middle of pack most of the time, when it comes to like Real world tests like loading game levels Seagate is generally faster, sometimes even better than WD Raptor. The File zip times are pretty good as well.I'm always suprised at this, something that is average in synthetic benchmarks to do quite well in real world tests.
imaheadcase - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I think its time to start shipping hardrive coolers standard with drive purchases like they do CPUs. heheScrogneugneu - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Well, I still wait the moment I'm supposed to say "Oh dear God this hard disk is fast!"...It qualifies in the middle of the disks, and under some conditions (in fact, only during the DOOM III loading test) stands out... but it falls short (VERY short) of impressing me...
Did you ever noticed that, for example, during the zip test, the vast majority of the disks differ only by 4 or 5 seconds on a minute of encoding? And in the case of unzipping, it's down to 1 or 2 seconds? Where am I supposed to notice the greater speed?
"I got the fastest hard drive in the world, I can zip my 300 MB files 3 seconds faster than you! You're jaleous, aren't you?"
PrinceGaz - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Yes, after the earlier promotional article about this drive, and now the title "Mouthwatering Benchmarks", I was expecting to be blown away by the blisteringly fast speed of the drive. It seemed pretty average really, nothing special at all apart from a high capacity (matched by a high price).blackbrrd - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I completely agree, having a title like "Seagate 7200.9 500GB: Mouthwatering Benchmarks" for this review is just wrong. Anandtech might get more hits in the short run, but looses credibility while doing so.I really don't like review sites that have misleading titles.