Testbed and Methods

Our testbed was configured as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard;
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA-307015 15GB HDD;
• Radeon 7000 32 MB graphics card;
• 256MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM;
• Promise Ultra133 TX2 controller;
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Pro with Service Pack 4.

The list of benchmarks remained the same:

• WinBench 99 2.0;
• FC-Test 0.5.3;
• Intel IOMeter 2003.02.15.

We will compare our today’s hero, WD740GD drive, with the previous generation Raptor drive aka WD360GD and three SCSI drives with 10,000rpm spindle rotation speed: Hitachi IC35L073UWDY10-0 and two Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 solutions (ST336607LW and ST373307LC). This way we will be able to compare two generations of HDD predators with each other and see how their performance differs from that of the SCSI drives of the corresponding storage capacity.

The tested HDDs had the following firmware versions:

Just in case I would like to stress that we tested a pre-production sample of the WD740GD drive. That is why I would regard the obtained results as preliminary.

For our tests we used the following controllers:

In WinBench package we ran the set of tests twice for each HDD: on a 32GB partition (this logical partition was created in the beginning of the drive) and on the entire disk space. All the WinBench tests were run 7 times each and then the best result was taken for further analysis.

To estimate how greatly the “locality” affects the HDD speed, we ran the WorkStation pattern in Intel IOMeter twice: for the entire HDD space and for the first 32GB.

For FC-Test the HDDs smaller than 64GB were formatted as two equal partitions, and if the HDD was bigger than 64GB, we simply created two 32GB partitions in the beginning.

The HDDs didn’t cool down between the tests.