The Maxtor team consists of three drives from the DiamondMax Plus 9 series plus the D740X-6L “oldie”. The last drive is strong enough, as you will see later!

Alas, we couldn’t get modern 80GB HDDs from Samsung with an 8MB cache buffer, so we don’t have the fastest Samsung products in this roundup. On the other hand, we have the results of Samsung’s drives with 5400 spindle rotation speed. I think it’s interesting to see how much slower they are against drives with a faster spindle.

Seagate is represented in full with its modern drives. Firstly, it is the only company that has two SATA drives in this test session, although they belong to different generations. Secondly, both SATA drives are equipped with an 8MB cache buffer. Let’s see how they perform in the tests.

We added a peculiar device to the three Caviar family drives from Western Digital – the WD740GD (Raptor). The distinguishing feature of the Raptor is its phenomenal speed – 10,000rpm! Of course, this drive is a potential winner of our today’s tests, but we are going to see soon that raw speed is not the only factor that matters. Note also that the Raptor produces more noise and vibration than 7200rpm hard disk drives.

Testbed and Methods

We had to use two controllers as we had hard disk drives that connect across two different interfaces. So we chose a Promise Ultra133 TX2 and a Promise SATA150 TX2 plus.

The Promise Ultra133 had the BIOS version 2.20.0.14 and the driver version 2.0.0.29.
The Promise SATA150 had the BIOS version 1.00.033 and the driver version 1.0.0.27.

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard (i865 chipset);
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU (533FSB);
• 256MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM, CL2;
• IBM DTLA 307015 system HDD;
• ATI RADEON VE graphics card;
• Windows 2000 Pro SP4.

We used the following benchmarking software:

• WinBench 99 2.0;
• Intel IOMeter 2003.02.15;
• FC-Test 0.5.3.

We wrote the Maxtor drives “through” to avoid the forced write checking (click here for details). The 6L080L4 drive also underwent special therapy – 10 “cold” cycles of start-stops for disabling write checking.

We formatted the drives in FAT32 and NTFS as one partition with the default cluster size (FAT32 formatting was performed by Paragon Partition Manager). We ran the tests seven times each, taking the best result for further analysis. The HDDs didn’t cool down between the tests. For FC-Test we partitioned the drive into two logical volumes, 32GB each. For Intel IOMeter tests, we used Sequential Read, Sequential Write, Database, Workstation, Fileserver and Webserver patterns. You can refer to our previous reviews for details about the patterns.