Hitachi vs. Western Digital vs. Seagate: A Battle of the Mammoths
by Purav Sanghani on December 2, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Real World Tests - Application Load Times
In our Application Load Time tests, we measure the time that it takes for each application to startup. For example, our benchmarking tool begins the stopwatch as soon as PhotoShopCS.exe is run, and stops after the application has finished loading all of the plug-ins and filters and shuts down. We take the average of three runs with system reboots and hard disk defragmentations before each test run.
In our Application Load Time tests, we measure the time that it takes for each application to startup. For example, our benchmarking tool begins the stopwatch as soon as PhotoShopCS.exe is run, and stops after the application has finished loading all of the plug-ins and filters and shuts down. We take the average of three runs with system reboots and hard disk defragmentations before each test run.
| Application Load Times (average, seconds) | |||||
| PhotoShop CS | Word 2003 | Excel 2003 | Access 2003 | PowerPoint 2003 | |
| Seagate 7200.9 500GB, 16MB, 3.0GB/sec | 8.024 | 2.109 | 2.109 | 2.213 | 2.203 |
| Hitachi 7K500, 16MB, 3.0GB/sec | 7.413 | 1.703 | 1.986 | 1.765 | 1.828 |
| Western Digital WD4000YR, 16MB 1.5GB/sec | 7.232 | 1.687 | 1.718 | 1.640 | 1.593 |
The WD4000YR takes the lead here as well, opening up each of the test applications slightly quicker than the other two drives. The numbers are close, but consistent enough for us to use in determining the best performing product.
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Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
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...