Western Digital SE16 750GB: "Quiet" a Performer
by Dave Robinet on August 9, 2007 2:00 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, 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 Raptor drive continues its dominance in our benchmarks, but the WD7500AAKS turns in a very solid showing. Its Business Winstone score of 829 is slightly slower than the Hitachi 7K1000, but significantly faster than the Seagate 7200.10 750GB drive or any of the other 500GB drives we've tested.
iPEAK General Task Tests
The iPEAK based General Task benchmarks are designed to replicate utility based applications 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 750GB performs consistently in third place in our benchmarks, producing results which are behind only the WD Raptor drive (hardly a fair comparison) and the other performance king, the Hitachi 7K1000. The only other 750GB drive tested (the Seagate 7200.10) is bested consistently by the WD7500AAKS.
Note that the WD7500AAKS does fall behind in the AVG Antivirus testing portion of this suite, coming in at a level close to the 7200.10 drive from Seagate. This is a significant improvement over previous WD SE series drives and indicates Western Digital has finely tuned their firmware for small block sizes of data in sequential order.
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, 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 Raptor drive continues its dominance in our benchmarks, but the WD7500AAKS turns in a very solid showing. Its Business Winstone score of 829 is slightly slower than the Hitachi 7K1000, but significantly faster than the Seagate 7200.10 750GB drive or any of the other 500GB drives we've tested.
iPEAK General Task Tests
The iPEAK based General Task benchmarks are designed to replicate utility based applications 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 750GB performs consistently in third place in our benchmarks, producing results which are behind only the WD Raptor drive (hardly a fair comparison) and the other performance king, the Hitachi 7K1000. The only other 750GB drive tested (the Seagate 7200.10) is bested consistently by the WD7500AAKS.
Note that the WD7500AAKS does fall behind in the AVG Antivirus testing portion of this suite, coming in at a level close to the 7200.10 drive from Seagate. This is a significant improvement over previous WD SE series drives and indicates Western Digital has finely tuned their firmware for small block sizes of data in sequential order.
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bigpow - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link
signs of times..when we no longer perceived Made in China as a bad thing, I've been hearing that it's actually preferred over the recent streams of Made in Thailand electronics.
It happened to Japan & Taiwan before, now most people are happy to see those labels when they buy something.
And of course, the cool-er things in life are still Made in USA ;)
-Not that where something is produced has anything to do with the quality.
Googer - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link
I noticed the Western Digital Raptor 150 was missing from this chart:http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/wd750_080807108...">http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/wd750_080807108...
Gary Key - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link
I have no idea why, but after hitting our engine update button again, it is there now. :)Googer - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link
In your benchmarking, you did not mention the size of the swapfile you have your OS set to use. I am sure it has an effect on application throughput. A static sized file is needed for benchmarking consistency.Gary Key - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link
Our standard swapfile is fixed at 2048MB and we clean the prefetch folder after each benchmark run.imaheadcase - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link
You can fill a WHS with 6 1TB drives for so cheap it will be great! Acoustics and heat will be a selling point for lots of people what that comes around.yyrkoon - Monday, August 13, 2007 - link
Heh, have you ever owned a 'Deathstar' ? Many, including myself will never venture down that road again.Martimus - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
I have avoided IBM drives after mine died on me after only about one year. Of course Hitachi bought them out, but I don't know if they have any better longevity than they used to.strikeback03 - Tuesday, August 14, 2007 - link
An Emachines computer I bought a few years ago had a Deskstar drive. Other than the anti-static meowing noise, no problems with it for the 3 years I owned it.mostlyprudent - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link
I am most impressed at how well the Hitachi 1TB drive continues to sit at the top of so many of the benchmarks.Your conclusion stating how well the WD drive does against the Seagate omitted the point raised in the Samsung article recently posted here. That is, Seagate's drive is almost a year older and their new 7200.11 drives are just around the corner.
Overall, it is impressive to see how tightly grouped these drive are. There seems very little reason to even consider a Raptor anymore.