Testbed and Methods

The testbed configuration looks as follows:

• ASUS P3B-F mainboard;
• Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 600MHz CPU;
• 2 x 128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM by Hyundai;
• IBM DTLA 307015 HDD;
• Matrox Millennium 4MB graphics card;
• Windows 2000 Professional SP2.

To test our WD drive with FireWire and USB 2.0 interfaces we used a PCI controller from SUNSWAY LIMITED:

As you can see, it carries both: a USB 2.0 chip from NEC and a FireWire controller from Agere. After we installed the drivers, the device manager recognized three new devices:

For a better comparison with our WD 250GB Special Edition Combo we used the results shown by WD2500JB.

The following software was used:

• WinBench 99 2.0;
• Intel IOMeter 1999.10.20;
• FC-Test v0.3.

Before the tests the AAM register of all HDDs was set to OFF position (FAST mode) with the help of Hitachi Feature Tool Utility. For WinBench tests all the drives were formatted in FAT32 and NTFS as one logical drive with the default cluster (to format the drives in FAT32 we used Paragon Partition Manager utility). The tests were run seven times each, the maximum result was taken for the diagrams. The drives 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.