Testbed and Methods

We will test Raptor with our standard test set and on our regular test platform.

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 600MHz CPU;
• ASUS P3B-F mainboard;
• 2 x 128MB PC100 SDRAM ECC by Hyundai;
• IBM DPTA 372050 HDD;
• Matrox Millennium 4MB graphics card;
• Windows 2000 Professional SP2.

ATA/100 hard disk drives were tested with Promise Ultra100 TX2 controller (BIOS: 2.20.0.14 Drivers: 2.00.29), and SerialATA drives were tested with two controllers: Promise SATA150 TX2 Plus (BIOS: v1.00.0.20 Drivers: 1.0.0.16 ) and SiliconImage SiI CP3112SATA150 (BIOS: 4.1.50 Drivers: 1.0.0.41).

We used the following software for our tests:

• HDTach 2.61;
• 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 software). The tests were run four 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.

The reviewed hard disk drives had the following firmware versions:

• WD400JB - 05.03E05
• WD360GD - 32.06G32

We tested WD360GD hard disk drive with Promise SATA150 TX2 Plus in three modes:

• Disabled caching;
• Enabled WT caching;
• Enabled WB caching.

As you may have noticed, the previous WT and WB set now includes one more mode, when Promise SATA150 TX2 Plus controller theoretically shouldn’t process the requests additionally.

In our article we will refer to these modes as follows:

• Promise (No) - Disabled caching;
• Promise (WT) - Enabled WriteThrough;
• Promise (WB) - Enabled WriteBack.

What will we compare the new WD Raptor with? First, we will take the results for WD400JB, because it would be interesting to see how greatly the performance differs by the drives from the same manufacturer but with different spindle rotation speed.

Second, we will take the results of two SCSI HDDs and two IDE RAID arrays built of Maxtor D740X-6L from our article called “IDE RAID vs. SCSI: Who Will Win?” . The SCSI drives from Seagate and Fujitsu will be our reference point for server performance, and IDE RAID arrays will allow us to estimate the effect of a faster spindle.

And third, WD360GD drive will be tested four times with different SATA controllers and with different caching settings.