Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
As far as the test rig goes for the ensuing benchmarks, there is nothing over the top. The bench consists of an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, an AMD64 3700, 2×512 Corsair XMS Pro Series with the flashy lights, a Geforce 6800GT, a Silverstone Zeus 500 watt PSU, and some 74GB Raptors in a RAID0 Configuration. Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2. Water Cooling.
I wanted to go a little over the top with the benchmarks on this drive because I read a lot of the hooplah surrounding it. There were a bunch of talks about the performance of this drive and I think because of that hooplah, COD has finally established its testing procedures. Benchmarking will come from various software applications: HD Tach 3 RW, SiSoftware Sandra 2007, FC-Test (thanks X-bit), PCMark 05, and Everest Ultimate Edition. I have opted to omit Winbench 99 because the results were very similar to the NEWER software mentioned. All our benchmarking software is available online so you can try yourself.
I was really surprised to see this drive smoke the other drives in burst speeds. It outperformed the Raptors (without RAID) and even outperformed its smaller sibling the WD2500KS (the 250GB version) by almost 22MB/s! The Average read speed was only outpaced by a hair, being bested by the Raptors which is very impressive for a 7200 RPM Drive. CPU Usage and Random access times are right on par with the other drives in its class and the numbers are relatively comforting.
Most of our readers seem to be familiar with the SiSoftware Sandra test suite. Sandra 2007 really validates the crown for this drive by showing a 199 MB/s buffered read score and taking the lead in almost all read benchmark tests. Write scores are not shabby for such a large drive with the crown in the sequential and random write tests.
FC-Test was designed by Xbit-Labs to facilitate real world testing of hard drives. It performs 3 major categories of testing in 5 different classes. Read, Write, and Copy tests are performed in Install (414 Files, 575MB Total Size), ISO (3 Files, 1600MB Total Size), MP3 (271 Files, 990MB Total Size), Programs (8504 Files, 1380MB Total Size), and Windows (9006 Files, 1060MB Total Size). The application times how long it takes to do these 3 tasks in each subset then calculates the speed in which it was completed. This test has proven to be repeatable and expressive of a drivers performance, with the exception of the Install test. The Install test proved flakey and testing had to be repeated a BUNCH of times to get results worth displaying.
