X-bit labs

500GB HDD Shootout: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 and Others! (page 22)

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 10/31/2006 | 02:57 PM ]

Performance in PCMark05

As time is passing by, applications and benchmarks grow old and inadequate. It’s time to try PCMark05!

The drives from Hitachi take the two top positions with a considerable lead. There’s only one WD drive following them now, it is the WD5000YS. The other drive from WD is only in eighth position. But the Seagate ST3750640AS is now very close to the WD5000YS.

Now let’s analyze the results of the drives in each of the subtests.

It seems the operating system Futuremark specialists used to record the trace didn’t change much. The two drives from Hitachi win here with a great lead over the others. They are followed by the two drives from WD while the bottom of the diagram is a place of struggle between Maxtor and Seagate.

The SATA drive from Hitachi copes with loading applications the best of all. After it, the two drives from WD and the second Hitachi are contending. The Maxtors are all at the bottom of the diagram, just like they were in PCMark04.

The General HDD Usage subtest is won by the Hitachi HTS725050KLA360, too. And again the drives from Hitachi and WD are at the top of the diagram. The difference from the previous subtest is that all the drives from Seagate are now at the bottom.

New in PCMark, the test of scanning files for viruses produces results that are hard to explain. Can the scanning speed be higher than the sequential read speed? We guess we won’t make any judgments basing on this subtest.

The test that measures the speed of writing a file (or files?) agrees with the earlier obtained results. The drives rank up according to their areal density.

So, that’s the end of our test program. We’ve got to do some summarizing now.