Seagate 7200.9 160GB: The Highest Platter Density to Date!

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 that the drive takes to complete an IO operation.

The 160GB 7200.9 performs, on average, 561 operations per second, which tops all of the other 160GB units on the chart including the 80GB/platter Samsung Spinpoint drives and even the 5 x 133GB/platter 500GB 7200.9. However, the drive is far behind Hitachi's 160GB 3.0Gb/sec T7K250 with 2 x 125GB platters and barely visible in Western Digital's rearview mirror as the WD1600JS comes second only to its 74GB Raptor cousin.

With two of these 160GB 7200.9 units in a RAID-0 setup, we see that the operations per second increase about 55%. We performed this test as a brief look at how RAID affects performance...and to prove to the skeptics that setting up two or more drives in RAID-0 at least will increase the performance. Here, we see that happening. Let's see if this trend continues.

Let's take a look at Content Creation performance.

The results for the 160GB 7200.9 are consistent here as well, as the single drive performs 378 operations per second just behind Seagate's last generation 400GB 7200.8 unit. Here, Hitachi's T7K250 drops behind, but only by an average of 6 operations per second, which makes very little difference, if any. The drives in a RAID-0 setup again increases performance about 58% from a single drive setup.

The read service times are also lower most likely due to the higher density, single platter design in the 160GB 7200.9. There is very little difference here between the single drive and RAID-0 (2x160GB) drive setups.

IPEAK Write Service Times

We have taken the liberty to also include the average Write Service Times for the 160GB 7200.9. The single 160GB 7200.9 drive has an average write service time of 8.67ms while our RAID-0 setup resulted in about half that at 4.67ms.