Performance in WinBench 99

We use WinBench to check the hard disk drives in the “desktop PC” mode. We format the disk in the NTFS file system by means of the system tools (the default cluster size is 4KB) and in FAT32 using Paragon Partition Manager (the cluster size is 32KB). We also perform our tests on 32GB capacity in NTFS and FAT32 file systems (partitioning the drives be means of the standard Windows 2000 Disk Manager).

We first discuss the physical parameters of the HDDs, which don’t depend on the file system.

Disk Access Time

The Seagate ST3160023AS (firmware 3.05) has the best average access time, and this explains its success in server-simulating patterns. The three-platter devices – Maxtor 6Y160L0 and Hitachi IC35L180AVV207-1 – have a slightly higher average access time. Then, the Hitachi team comes in a dense group – they traditionally boast a good access time.

The PATA drives from Seagate are in the bottom of the diagram: the speed of moving the heads around has been sacrificed for their noiselessness…

WinBench 99: Disk Transfer Rate

The results in this test directly depend on the areal density per platter, so only modern drives with 80GB platters can hope for a victory here.

That’s right – the top of the diagram is besieged by high-areal-density drives, whose results differ but slightly among themselves. Three-platter devices gathered up at the bottom of the table, mingled with the Seagate team. The poor results of the drives from that firm can easily be explained if you take a look at their data-transfer graphs.

HDDs with “shortened” platters can be easily spotted in the diagram. They don’t use the full capacity of their platters and have a very high read speed at the end of the disk! Clearly, the WD1600JB and Maxtor 6Y160L0 fall into this category – both drives have three platters and six read/write heads, so the capacity of their platters is not even 60GB, but rather 53GB.

Note also the speed at which the Seagate ST3160023AS with firmware 3.05 is reading the last tracks – considering this abnormally high speed, we can say it is a cut-down drive, too! Is it a three-platter device, too?

But that’s impossible, since Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 disks use two platters (at least, so far)!

It turned out simple: if you examine the data-transfer graph of the Seagate ST3160023AS with firmware 3.05, you may notice that the disk hadn’t been recognized for its full capacity, 160GB! It’s incredible, that it is a fact, nonetheless. Until now, we thought the Promise S150 TX2 Plus controller had no problems identifying a disk’s full capacity – that’s exactly why we used this controller in all our tests.

An update of the controller’s BIOS may solve this problem, but it’s also possible that such an update would affect the controller’s own speed. If it does, would we be right to compare the old results (with the old controller’s BIOS) with new ones? We decide to keep the old BIOS for the time being, as this problem only occurred with one hard disk drive and with one definite firmware version.

Getting back to the Seagate ST160023AS model with firmware 3.05, we had to repudiate the results of that drive. They were overestimated because the disk’s address space was not used to the full – the farthest tracks were “cut off”, resulting in a lower average access time. Just take a look at the Disk Access Time diagram to see how much the ST3160023AS with firmware 3.05 got from this incorrect capacity detection – 0.7msec. It seems like a trifle, but this drive had a big advantage over the others in tests that were tightly tied to the average access time parameter.

You can view the data-transfer graphs we got with the help of WinBench 99 by the following links:

• Hitachi IC35180AVV207-1 (graph);
• Hitachi HDS722516VLAT20 (graph);
• Hitachi HDS722516VLAT80 (graph);
• Hitachi HDS722516VLSA80 (graph);
• Maxtor 6Y160L0 (graph);
• Maxtor 6Y160M0 (graph);
• Maxtor 6Y160P0 (graph);
• Samsung SP1604N (graph);
• Samsung SP1614N (graph);
• Samsung SP1614C (graph);
• Seagate ST3160021A-fw3.04 (graph);
• Seagate ST3160021A-fw3.06 (graph);
• Seagate ST3160023A-fw3.06 (graph);
• Seagate ST3160023A-fw3.71 (graph);
• Seagate ST3160023AS-fw3.05 (graph);
• Seagate ST3160023AS-fw3.14 (graph);
• Seagate ST3160023AS-fw3.18 (graph);
• WD 1600LB (graph);
• WD 1600BB (graph);
• WD 1600JB (graph);
• WD 1800JB (graph);
• WD 1600JD/60 (graph);
• WD 1600JD/80 (graph).