Western Digital WD2500YD: Enterprise on the Desktop
by Gary Key on June 24, 2006 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
iPEAK Business Application Tests
Our iPEAK Winstone benchmarks offer a glimpse into how well our hard disk drives will handle general office applications, media encoding, and graphics manipulation. While the business applications that are being tested tend to be more CPU bound at times, the performance of the hard drive can and will make a difference in the more disk intensive video and graphics applications where large media files are typically being edited.
As expected the WD Raptor places first as its 10k RPM spindle speed and optimized cache play an important role in its ability to sustain high transfer rates, especially in the Content Creation benchmark where transfer block sizes are significantly larger than in the Business application benchmark. The WD RE2 400GB drive makes a very strong showing in these benchmarks as it continues its slight lead over the RE2 500GB drive with our RE16 250GB trailing behind but still placing ahead of the Seagate drives in the Business Winstone benchmark and splitting the middle in the Content Creation test.
iPEAK General Task Tests
The iPEAK based General Task benchmarks are designed to replicate utility based application tasks that typically are disk intensive and represent common programs utilized on the majority of personal computers. While the WinRAR program is very CPU intensive it will typically stress the storage system in short bursts. Our antivirus benchmark will stress the storage system with continual reads and sporadic write requests while the defragmentation process is split between continual read and write requests.
The WD RE2 500GB drive flips the table on the RE2 400GB drive while posting better numbers in all tests except the antivirus test where it continues to show weak results compared to the other WD drives. The WD2500YD is very competitive in this series of tests except in the defragmentation test where is finishes last and is a good 37% slower than the WD RE2 500GB drive. We also completed a separate application timing program on an identical drive image with the same percentage differential being posted between the two drives utilizing the XP defragmentation program. The WD RE2 500GB finished a good 4 minutes quicker. We noticed the RE16 250GB drive would stutter and pause at certain points in the process while the RE2 drives remained constantly active.
Our iPEAK Winstone benchmarks offer a glimpse into how well our hard disk drives will handle general office applications, media encoding, and graphics manipulation. While the business applications that are being tested tend to be more CPU bound at times, the performance of the hard drive can and will make a difference in the more disk intensive video and graphics applications where large media files are typically being edited.
As expected the WD Raptor places first as its 10k RPM spindle speed and optimized cache play an important role in its ability to sustain high transfer rates, especially in the Content Creation benchmark where transfer block sizes are significantly larger than in the Business application benchmark. The WD RE2 400GB drive makes a very strong showing in these benchmarks as it continues its slight lead over the RE2 500GB drive with our RE16 250GB trailing behind but still placing ahead of the Seagate drives in the Business Winstone benchmark and splitting the middle in the Content Creation test.
iPEAK General Task Tests
The iPEAK based General Task benchmarks are designed to replicate utility based application tasks that typically are disk intensive and represent common programs utilized on the majority of personal computers. While the WinRAR program is very CPU intensive it will typically stress the storage system in short bursts. Our antivirus benchmark will stress the storage system with continual reads and sporadic write requests while the defragmentation process is split between continual read and write requests.
The WD RE2 500GB drive flips the table on the RE2 400GB drive while posting better numbers in all tests except the antivirus test where it continues to show weak results compared to the other WD drives. The WD2500YD is very competitive in this series of tests except in the defragmentation test where is finishes last and is a good 37% slower than the WD RE2 500GB drive. We also completed a separate application timing program on an identical drive image with the same percentage differential being posted between the two drives utilizing the XP defragmentation program. The WD RE2 500GB finished a good 4 minutes quicker. We noticed the RE16 250GB drive would stutter and pause at certain points in the process while the RE2 drives remained constantly active.
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Calin - Monday, June 26, 2006 - link
On RealTimePricing a 150GB Raptor is at $260. Could you throw a comparation with one of the cheaper 147GB SCSI models (at around $350)? If one want more performance and consider paying $260 for a Raptor instead a bit less for three times the capacity, they could accept paying one and a half times the price for a third the capacity in a SCSI drive.With considerations of sound and heat, not only performance, of course.
Thanks