But why do we explore performance in professional applications using FAT32? Let’s go over to NTFS.

The new Samsung is on equal terms with the IBM/Hitachi in NTFS. How did it manage that?

The IBM/Hitachi won in AVS/Express only (traditionally, by the way), but the Samsung paid back in Premiere. The Maxtor drive turned very slow in SoundForge once again, while Seagate HDD lost to Samsung all the sub-tests, except AVS/Express.

Here we are! Hard disk drives from Samsung used to be weak in WinBench, but now there is no trace of this weakness left. We have only the best or near the best results, and only the AVS/Express sub-test proved to be a hard nut!

Performance in Intel IOMeter

Time to have some Intel IOMeter here. This powerful tool can give out indispensable info about peculiarities of a hard disk drive.

First of all, let’s check the drives’ ability to read and write data blocks of various sizes.

Maxtor is beyond any competition in sequential read, with the Samsung closely following. That’s quite good, as it left the IBM/Hitachi and Seagate as well as the previous Samsung model, in its wake.

The Maxtor drive was quite confident at writing, too, but allowed Seagate to defeat it starting from 8KB blocks on. Once again, a specimen from the first shipments of Barracuda 7200.7 was slower than Samsung PL40, which is ahead of both: IBM/Hitachi and its own ancestor.