FC-Test (FAT32)

In conclusion we would like to run a benchmark measuring how fast the files can be created, copied and read. This is our FC-Test (see this article for more details about this benchmark). The HDDs performance was measured with 5 preliminarily prepared file sets. The test names let you guess very easily which folder served as a prototype: Install, ISO, MP3, Programs and Windows.

Why do we use so many different files here? You may think it could be more than enough to take one big file or a few hundreds of small files to measure all the speeds. The matter is that we wanted to take the “real” HDD performance, that is how fast it works with the real and not synthetic files. Since hard disk drives from different manufacturers cope with files of different sizes not equally fast, we need quite a lot of files of the same size to be able to detect the HDD’s native inclination.

Since the results in this table are given in MB/sec, it should be easy to compare different HDDs with one another. And for a more illustrative analysis here are some diagrams:

As for SATA controllers working algorithms, the results obtained in this test session do repeat everything we saw during the tests of Seagate Barracuda SATA V. so, now we have every right to state that the controllers performance differently because of different driver algorithms.

This way Promise (WB) controller speeds up the writing quite noticeably, but doesn’t stand out at all during reading. It is remarkable, however, that it still manages to perform well in copy tests with smaller files.

SiliconImage controller is stably fast in all modes. It outperforms Promise (WT) and Promise (No).

As for the performance of our hero against the background of Fujitsu MAN SCSI drive or WD400JB, the new Raptor is always faster than the rivals.