Testbed and Methods

The following testing utilities were used:

• IOMeter 2003.02.15
• WinBench 99 2.0
• FC-Test 1.0
• PCMark 2004
• PCMark 2005
• PCMark Vantage

Testbed configuration:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz processor
• IBM DTLA-307015 system disk, 15GB
• Radeon 7000 graphics card with 32MB of onboard memory
• 256MB DDR2-533 SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2

We installed the generic OS drivers for the drives and formatted them in FAT32 and NTFS as one partition with the default cluster size. For some tests 32GB partitions were created on the drives and formatted in FAT32 and NTFS with the default cluster size, too. The drives were connected to a Promise SATA300 TX4302 controller and switched from the quiet mode (with Advanced Acoustic Management enabled) into the fast seek mode whenever necessary.