Performance in WinBench

Now we can plunge into an analysis of Winmarks.

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Back from the example of the WD Caviar SE, I know that 8MB-buffered models have a hefty advantage at office applications. The big buffer may account for a 25% performance gain – a nice bonus! The SerialATA drives perform like the PATA ones here, while the ATA/100 interface is slightly better than ATA/133. This test is rather indifferent to the linear speed, so the previous generation of drives have just a little worse results.

Advanced Visualization Studio, as far as I could see in previous test sessions, is highly sensitive to the deferred write algorithms. There’s no simple explanation of the results: the latest firmware for the SATA models did well in FAT32, but lost to the previous version (24-th) in NTFS. The previous generation did unbelievably well in NTFS, occupying the middle of the diagram, but suffered a defeat in FAT32 where the cluster is bigger size and linear speed matters much!

FrontPage is susceptible to Windows’ and to the controller driver’s caching, so the speeds exceed the theoretical peak of the interface bandwidth. There’s no sense in trying to explain this mess. Moreover, the difference between the modals is small enough.