by Andrey Kuznetcov
04/06/2005 | 04:22 PM
Western Digital was among the last ones to join the competition in the compact 2.5-inch hard disk drives market. The devices of this kind sell better and better, and the demand for them is growing significantly. These HDDs have every chance to oust their 3.5-inch fellows from the desktop segment, not to mention their active invasion into the laptop and other portable platforms. These facts and tendencies do not allow us to disregard the products like that from any player in the HDD market.
Western Digital’s adequate reaction to this market growth was the announcement of their new Scorpio drive, which we are going to take a closer look at today.
What should a 2.5” hard disk drive be like in order to survive the cut-throat competition and win its niche in the promising and growing market? As we see, it has already got a great sounding name. Of course, a good name matter a lot for successful marketing, but this is not all you need. The first “exterior” impression is important, but without worthy technical specifications, it will hardly last long. Let’s see what they are by our today’s hero.
The storage capacity is pretty common, no records here. The models we had in our lab features 40GB and 80GB storage capacities. Besides that there is also a 60GB model. The manufacturer claims that they are trying to meet the demand for the most widely spread capacities. The standard drives from this product line will feature a 2MB buffer (UE letters in the model name stand for that), however, all three models can also feature an 8MB buffer (in this case the model name will include letters VE).
The spindle rotation speed is quite typical of this HDD form-factor: 5,400rpm. Although Western Digital claims that the power consumption corresponds to the rate of a model with 4,200rpm spindle rotation speed, which is very important if the drive is powered autonomously. For example, if you work in read/write mode, you need 2.5W of power. The drives supports 12ms average seek time, and 2ms track-to-track seek time. The average latency equals 5.5ms. These drives support Ultra ATA5 interface providing up to 10MB/s data transfer rate.
Scorpio product family drives are designed with WhisperDrive technology. Besides, these drives also support special heads working mode aka SoftSeek, which reduces significantly the level of noise they produce during operation. ShockGuard technology implemented in these drives reduces to the minimum the effect of physical shocks on the HDD mechanism and especially on the platters surface. The HDDs can stand the operational shock of up to 250G (2ms), and the non-operational shock of up to 900G (1ms). Special DualStep Ramp technology locks the heads off the platter work surface to ensure additional protection against physical shocks. Enhanced anti-shock robustness of the drive is achieved due to the stainless steel casing. According to the manufacturer, this allows the drives to handle 1.5 times higher direct pressure than any other drive in the market without harming their functionality and performance.
The drive is 9.5mm x 100.2mm x 69.85mm in size and weighs 117g (for dual-platter models).
The approximate price for an 80GB model is around $130.
We used the following benchmarking software:
The testbed was configured as follows:
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.
The low-level Intel IOMeter benchmark was used to test the linear read and write speed of the drive. During the test session there is a stream of read/write requests sent to the drive with the queue depth=4. The data block size changes every minute. As a result we can see the dependence of the linear read/write speed on the data block size.
On the first graph we see that the Scorpio drive yields only to the Seagate ST9100823A and shows about the same linear read speed as Hitachi HTS541080G9AT00. I would also like to note that in case of smaller data blocks processing, it is also defeated by Samsung MP0804H.
The second diagram shows the linear write speed. Scorpio drive managed to become the leader when working with smaller data blocks (up to 4KB inclusive). Then, starting with 8KB data blocks, it moves to the stable second position after Seagate ST9100823A.
With the help of a WorkStation pattern we imitated the intensive work of our testing participants in different applications.
Here we suggest taking a closer look at only one diagram showing the performance rating for each drive calculated according to the following formula:
Performance = Total I/O (queue=1)/1 + Total I/O (queue=2)/2 + Total I/O (queue=4)/4 + Total I/O (queue=8)/8 + Total I/O (queue=16)/16 + Total I/O (queue=32)/32
Our today’s main character, WD800VE, copes with this workload very well. It is just a little behind Seagate ST9100823A and is faster than all other hard disk drives with the same storage capacity.
We will start with the results of the classical WinBench 99 test and the linear read speed from the surface of the drives:
Western Digital WD800VE
Western Digital WD400VE
Judging by these graphs, Scorpio hard drives have very competitive data density per platter.
At first we will check the performance of Western Digital WD800VE in FAT32 file system. The diagram above indicates that Scorpio drive is the second fastest after Seagate ST9100823A. It leaves behind all the rivals with the same storage capacity. Although its advantage over Hitachi HTS541080G9AT00 is minimal.
On the next diagram we provided the results for NTFS file system. Again Western Digital WD800VE is in the second position after Seagate ST9100823A, as we have expected. This time, however, it managed to get farther ahead of the other opponents from Samsung and Hitachi. This is a perfect illustration of the fact that the performance of WD Scorpio drive is less dependent on the type of the file system, than by the competitors.
The data transfer rate of WD800VE during reading is much lower than that of the Seagate drive, which belongs to a different HDD class, and is just a little lower than that of a Hitachi HDD.
The last diagram shows average access time for FAT32 file system. The highest value here belongs to WD Scorpio drive. This is one of its major failures.
We used FC-test to measure the real practical performance of our testing participants. Let me remind you once again that the credible performance measurements are guaranteed by the working principles of this software we developed in our labs for HDD testing. The main idea of FC-Test is to measure the time the hard disk drives need to create (write), read and copy file sets, which differ from one another by the type, size and number of files. Then we calculate the practical performance of the drive basing on the time measurements.
As you remember from our previous HDD reviews, Windows and Programs patterns include a large number of smaller files, and the remaining three patterns – ISO, MP3 and Install – work with a limited number of larger files. For copy operations each drive is formatted into two 32GB equal logical partitions. The patterns are copied either within the same partition or from one partition to another.
First of all let’s see how the drives behave in FAT32 file system. The first diagram represents the file creation (writing) speeds. Western Digital WD800VE can be considered a winner summing up its results in all five patterns. It feels especially confident in patterns working with larger files winning the first prize in both of them.
The next diagram represents file reading. In this case WD drive doesn’t perform that convincing. In most cases it falls behind the Seagate and Hitachi solutions.
Copy near (within a single partition) pushes Scorpio drive to the last position in almost all cases. It manages to outperform Seagate drive only once in Windows pattern.
On the last diagram for this batch we see that WD drive is again the slowest. This time in all five patterns.
Now it’s high time we checked out the performance of our drives in NTFS file system. The files creation (writing) speed of the WD Scorpio drive makes it the winner in four patterns out of five.
The diagram with the read speed results shows that Western Digital solution yields only to the drive from Seagate. In four patterns out of five the Scorpio retains its second position and only once it takes the third prize.
Copying the files within the same partition makes Western Digital yield to Seagate again in all five patterns. It performed nearly as fast as the Hitachi drive.
The last Copy Far diagram shows that WD Scorpio is an outsider in three patterns working with larger files. In other two patterns, WD800VE is defeated by the HDD from Seagate, but runs almost neck and neck with the Hitachi drive.
The testing of a new 2.5-inch Scorpio hard disk drive from Western Digital revealed a very competitive product. In fact, we didn’t expect anything else. Because if you are entering the market with a new type of device, you’d better know what you are doing. The hard disk drive should be at least as good as the competitor’s solutions, otherwise it will not get a warm welcome from the users.
And this is exactly what happened. If we do not take into account the drive from Seagate (ST9100823A), which actually belongs to a little bit different weight category, then WD Scorpio will look great against the competitors’ background, and will even boast a few advantages over them.
I would like to stress specifically two things. First, high write speed. And second a slight performance difference depending on the type of the file system we use: FAT32 or NTFS.
As it always happens in situations like that, the success of the Western Digital Scorpio family will depends on the attractive pricing, since it is as good as the competitors’ solutions in terms of features.