Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
Most of the enthusiast scene has become wildly familiar with FutureMark benchmarking products. They are the famed creators of the 3DMark suite and the PCMark suite. PCMark 05 benchmarks these drives and gives useful information about their performance; providing information about performance in Windows XP Startup, Application Loading, Virus Scanning, File Writing, and General usage.
The next test, Iometer, was added to benchmark the multi user environment and simply stated; it is both a workload generator and a measurement tool. Iometer measures performance under a controlled load measuring I/Os at varying depths. Iometer will be used with two of the better known scenarios, the File Server and Database patterns. A lot of information can be extrapolated from this such as Total MB/s, Average I/O Response times, and more. The patterns of File Server and Database will be run at a depth of 1 – 128 I/Os in a doubling fashion (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128).
The Ultimate Edition of the Everest software provides extra features over its less inclined siblings. With this version of the software, you can benchmark your HDD’s. These benchmarks will be Linear Reading at the beginning, middle, and end, access times, and buffered read. From these results, we can verify that what the other benchmarks are seeing is valid.
If this drives burst speeds could be compared to a cartoon character, it would definitely be the Road Runner on crack. The drive bursts faster than any other single drive tested to date at C.O.D. but only really runs with the pack as for sustained transfers in synthetic benchmarks. The drive really only falls short in multi-user environments; environments where this drive wasn’t intended for as was evident by the Iometer results. If speed and warranty are enough to get you to buy a drive, this is the drive for you. This is a strong showing for the drive and I am very excited to see what Hitachi has in store for us in the future. When it comes down to it… would I buy one? At only a few bucks more than the WD5000KS, the answer is a resounding YES.
