ABOUT BENCH FORUMS PODCAST LOGIN REGISTER
PC Components
Smartphones & tablets
Systems
ENTERPRISE & IT
GUIDES

Hitachi vs. Western Digital vs. Seagate: A Battle of the Mammoths

 by Purav Sanghani on December 2, 2005 12:05 AM EST
46 Comments | Add A Comment
46 Comments
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 back each capture using RankDisk, which reports back to us a mean service time, or average time that the drive takes to complete an IO operation.

IPEAK Business Winstone 2004 - Pure Hard Disk Performance

The 500GB Seagate’s 541 IO operations per second is no match for the 7K500 and WD4000YR drives at 746 and 769 IO operations per second under the Business Winstone 2004 IPEAK capture. We were also surprised to see the WD4000YR perform so well, since it is using the 1 st generation 1.5Gb/sec interface.

Let's take a look at Content Creation performance.

IPEAK Content Creation Winstone 2004 - Pure Hard Disk Performance

Again, Seagate does not do well in the Content Creation portion of the Winstone 2004 IPEAK capture. Western Digital comes out on top at about 505 IO operations per second with the 7K500 following at 458 IO operations per second.

IPEAK Average Read Service Time

The mean read service time reported by IPEAK’s AnalyzeDisk is the time that it takes for a request to be fulfilled by the drive. Even the IPEAK service times reported are far from being in favor of the 500GB 7200.9 at 13.9ms. The 7K500 takes 1 st place here with 12.821ms and 2 nd place is taken by the WD4000YR at 13.060ms.

The Test WinBench 99 - Transfer Rate Test
PRINT THIS ARTICLE
Comments Locked

46 Comments

View All Comments

  • Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    quote:
    Kinda reminds me of AGP... or PCI... or pretty much most of the standards these days getting replaced by "better faster must have!" standards that cost the end user money and offer no real improvement in performance.


    I can understand mentioning AGP, but PCI? You gotta be kidding me... that bus is such a bottleneck. You dont even have to run PCI cards to find out, just stress all the on-board stuff on a feature rich mobo and you'll notice it too.

  • Cygni - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    Which explains the rush from the mfts to get PCI-Ex cards out the door. :p Really, the only 2 cards that i can see benifiting from the PCI Express bus are high level RAID cards and gigabit ethernet... both of which are being fully integrated into southbridges anyway.

  • Hikari - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    You said AGP and PCI, not AGP and PCIe. Obviously there isn't a lot of difference between the latter, but there is quite a bit of difference between the former.

  • Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    They are integrated into southbridge and still utilize the PCI bus mostly. PCI bus aint only the slot you see on your mobo, you know..

  • Anton74 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    High level RAID? A single PATA drive has an interface speed identical to that of the PCI bus (133MB/s) these days, all by itself. And then there's SATA with 150MB/s and 300MB/s interface speeds now. Not to mention the PCI bus is usually shared with a multitude of devices, all wanting some bandwidth.

  • puffpio - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    It seems anomalous that the Western Digital Raptor 10000RPM drive is sooo much slower in the Doom 3 level load test compared to all the other drives. It sticks out like a sore thumb. It doesn't make sense because it had been dominating the other tests...
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.
BENCH
TOPICS
FOLLOW
ABOUT

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now