If you have read our Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 HDD Family Review, you should remember that there are a few subtests within High-End WinMark benchmark, which depend greatly on the linear speed. We also know that linear speed in 180GXP has got significantly higher. So, why doesn’t 120GXP lose then? Let’s take a glance at some results of these subtests:

It turns out that 120GXP is 8% faster than its successor in NTFS tests working with video, and 180GXP boasts an 8% advantage over the predecessor only in Photoshop. Witnessing the worst defeat of 180GXP in FrontPage we can state that Vancouver2 is no longer so great in NTFS, as its predecessor used to be, while in FAT32 they retain the parity. Anyway, vancouver2 acquired one very useful feature: larger buffer. I wonder how greatly it will improve the situation now?

In different situations we see from5% to 25% performance boost, however, large buffer doesn’t matter that much for NTFS as it does for FAT32. No doubt, that 180GXP and NTFS are far not the best combination today. There used to be a time when NTFS was WD’s kingdom. Then IBM ousted the competitor from there. And now IBM is leaving the conquered territory. Or it isn’t? We will be able to answer this question when we get the chance to test a new solution from Hitachi, the inheritor of IBM’s HDD business.

But wait, there is still a lot of great stuff left for you :) Have a look at the results obtained for 80GB model tested with two different firmware versions :) maybe the new version will perform better in NTFS, who knows?

The wonder happened and didn’t happen at the same time. To be more exact, we expected quite another thing. All in all, the results in NTFS improved a little bit. Moreover, the biggest improvement occurred exactly where Deskstar 180GXP suffered the worst defeat from 120GXP: in AVS: Express. But look how greatly the Sound Forge results grew in FAT32! As you know this benchmark is very sensitive to lazy writing efficiency and here the model with a 2MB buffer outpaces its counterparts with a large 8MB one! It is even more exciting as the 120GB model features the same firmware version: A66A… Unbelievable…

By the way, according to our observations, in the new firmware version the read buffer segmentation has been brought back to the common 12 segments.