Testbed and Methods

We used the following benchmarking software:

• WinBench 99 2.0;
• FC-Test 1.0;
• Intel IOMeter 2003.02.15.

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro mainboard;
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA-307015 HDD, 15GB;
• RADEON 7000 32GB graphics card;
• 256MB DDR SDRAM;
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4.

We tested the drive using the generic drivers of the OS. The drives were formatted in FAT32 and NTFS file systems as a single partition with the default cluster size. In some cases, specifically mentioned below, we created 32GB partitions (FAT32 and NTFS, default cluster size).

In order to make a more objective performance analysis, we compared WD800VE drive against three similar solutions from Hitachi and Samsung, featuring the same storage capacity, and against Seagate drive with 100GB storage capacity, because unfortunately, we didn’t have an 80GB model at our disposal at the time of testing. The results obtained for the smallest member of the WD Scorpio family, the 40GB WD400VE are given for your information in the tables only, and are not present on the diagrams.