Testbed and Methods

To form the basis for interesting comparison, we have picked up several HDD models with similar specifications from all manufacturers, except Western Digital. All recent WD drives which came through out test lab had very big capacity, which is mostly due to WD itself. The company has made a rule to debut with super-capacious novices, and to keep producing models of smaller storage capacities on older and smaller platters. A little while ago, we reviewed WD400JB, but it would be incorrect to include it into this review as it has 8MB of cache, while all other drives – 2MB. Besides, it costs more than Samsung PL40 and is based on a smaller platter.

So, here is the list of our today’s participants:

1. The top-end disk from the Samsung SpinPoint PL40 line, its model number is SP0411N, with TW100-07 firmware. Tested on ATA/100 and ATA/133 interfaces.
2. The direct rival to Samsung – 6E040L0 model from the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 family. Tested on the ATA/133 interface.
3. The junior model from the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 family, the ST340014A model.
4. A disk from the former Samsung SpinPoint P40 family, the SP4002H model.
5. A rare, but quite interesting product from IBM/Hitachi – IC35L040AVV207-0 from the Deskstar 180GXP product line.

Numbers 1, 2 and 3 have full-capacity 80GB platters and one read/write head – they are going to show fair play. Number 4 is based on an out-dated 40GB platter, and number 5 has a 60GB platter “shortened” to 40GB. It’s going to have the best average access time and favor IOMeter tests, but this will make it more interesting to compare the new Samsung with it.

To make this article an easy reading, I refer to the drives by their family names. For example, Hitachi 180GXP rather than Hitachi Deskstar IC35L040AVV207-0.

Our testbed configuration looked as follows:

• ASUS P3B-F mainboard;
• Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 600MHz CPU;
• 2 x 128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM by Hyundai;
• IBM/Hitachi DPTA 372050 host HDD;
• Matrox Millennium 4MB graphics card;
• Promise Ultra100 TX2 and Promise Ultra133 TX2 controllers;
• Windows 2000 Professional SP2.

We used the following benchmarking software:

• HDTach 2.61;
• WinBench 99 2.0;
• Intel IOMeter 1999.10.20;
• FC-Test v.0.5.3.

All drives that support “quiet/fast” operation modes were switched to the fast mode by means of Hitachi Feature Tool. For WinBench tests, the drives were formatted in FAT32 and NTFS as a single partition with a default cluster size. We used Paragon Partition Manager for FAT32 formatting. The benchmarks were run seven times each; the maximum result was counted in. The HDDs didn’t cool down between the tests. The tests in Intel IOMeter were run in SequentialRead, SequentialWrite, DataBase, WorkStation, FileServer and WebServer patterns. If you are looking for the detailed description of these patterns, please, see our previous articles.