Performance in Winbench99

Now we will continue our desktop performance investigation with the help of WinBench99 tests et. I believe you are pretty familiar with this test that is why no introduction is necessary. As usual we will start our discussion with FAT32 results:

Before we go into details with our discussion of Business Disk WinMark and High-End Disk WinMark, let’s take a quick look at the Disk Inspection Test:

Note that this time we also provided two results for AAT (Average Access Time): one obtained on the entire storage capacity of the drive and another one obtained during the tests on the first 32GB of the drive.

Since a multi-platter drive involved fewer cylinders to create a 32GB logical partition, they boast better random sector seek time within these 32GB. And the larger is the HDD, the bigger is the difference between these two AAT values (if the platters are similar in both cases). Now you should understand why the manufacturers are always trying to provide the model with the highest storage capacity for review: if the test is based on “locality” then…

I would like to draw your attention to the results difference of the Hitachi drive: it has the biggest gap between the two AAT values of all the testing participants. The matter is that this is a three-platter drive, while all other our 73GB solutions are dual-platter ones. And if we use only 23GB of its storage space, then the width of the working zone per platter will be smaller than by its competitors.

As we can also see the lowest AAT belongs to WD740GD with Intel ICH5 controller: 7.7ms. The remarkable thing is that the measured AAT corresponds ideally to the calculated value: 4.7ms (average seek time) + 3.0ms (rotational latency) = 7.7ms.

Now let’s compare the linear read speed of our drives:

Well, the read speed in the beginning and in the end of the raptor drive is much higher than by its predecessor and even SCSI competitors. And the correlation between the read speed in the beginning/end of the new Raptor drive is simply excellent.