X-bit labs

Battle for 160GB: Hard Disk Drive Roundup Part I (page 6)

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 03/16/2007 | 03:32 PM ]

Western Digital

Western Digital has only one drive in this roundup.

The case has a rather gloomy color – the manufacturers sometimes use such tricks as an unusual color to attract the potential customer’s attention. We hope Western Digital doesn’t play cheap tricks to us. Perhaps the company just shows its mourning for its late competitors J.

The WD1600JS belongs to the Caviar SE series and thus has an 8MB cache buffer. Like one of the Hitachis, the model is rather old and required three surfaces from two platters to achieve the capacity of 160GB. There are dual-headed models of the same capacity available now which can be distinguished by two extra letters in the model name - WD1600AAJS . The two magic letters AA may do miracles, but we’re running too far ahead…

Let’s get back to the specs:

That’s all the HDDs we are going to test today.

Testbed and Methods

Our testbed:

• ASUS Ascot 6AR system case
• Albatron PX868PE Pro II mainboard
• Intel Pentium4 2.4GHz CPU
• 256MB Samsung PC3200 DDR SDRAM
• IBM DTLA 307015 system disk
• ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card
• Windows XP Pro SP2

Our tests:

• IOMeter 2004.07.30
• Winbench99
• File Copy Test 1.0b13
• PCMark04
• PCMark05

The IOMeter tests are performed on non-formatted disks. For WinBench 99 the hard disks are formatted in NTFS for their full capacity and the data-transfer graph is recorded. Then a 32GB partition is created on them and formatted in NTFS and then in FAT32 to perform the main test program. To reduce measurement errors, we run the test seven times and calculate the average.

For the File Copy Test two 32GB partitions are created on the disks, formatted in NTFS and then in FAT32. The partitions are created at the beginning of the disk address space.

PCMark04 and PCMark05 run on the full disk capacity formatted in NTFS. These tests are performed ten times each and the results are averaged.