Performance in WinBench99

The good old WinBench 99 is a hale man and knows a lot about “household” performance of hard disk drives.

Linear read speed graphs are given below (click to view):

• Samsung SP0411N graph
• Maxtor 6E040L0 graph
• Seagate ST30014A graph
• Samsung SP4002H graph
• IBM/Hitachi IC35L040AVV2-0 graph

Let’s start analyzing the WinMark tests for FAT32 file system:

IBM/Hitachi drives have been the favorites in WinBench for a few years already and this time is no exception. Strangely enough, Seagate drive won the second place. This is even stranger, as the sample we tested some time ago boasted no better performance than the old SpinPoint P40 that shows the worst result here. Seagate managed to pull up its drive to the leading group by simply changing its firmware version from 3.00 to 3.06. That’s really mysterious, but this review is not about Seagate :).

Samsung PL40 does quite good, outrunning in High-End WinMark its direct competitor – Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8. To better understand why it happened, let’s consider the results for separate applications.

So, Samsung PL40 is far ahead of Maxtor DM+8 in SoundForge only. This test is sensitive to lazy write implementation. We thank Samsung for not following the distasteful practice of deliberately worsening the firmware features, so that they could distinguish between the product lines. We saw this in products from Maxtor, Seagate and WD. In all remaining tests SpinPoint PL40 goes neck and neck with the Maxtor, and they both do better than the overall leader (IBM/Hitachi) in Visual C++, Premiere, Photoshop and FrontPage.