Hard Drive Performance Comparison Guide

[Dashken]

Ever wanted a guide on hard drive performance, where you can compare the performance of a wide range of hard drives? Well, we are not quite there yet, but that is our ultimate objective.

In this performance comparison guide, we will test and compare the performance of all the hard drives we can get our hands on. This is similar to what we are doing in the Intel Core 2 Processor Performance Comparison Guide.

Here's a quote from the guide :-

"WinBench 99 2.0 has proven that it can still serve as a consistent and reliable hard drive benchmark even in Windows Vista. It has given us a lot of interesting data. If the Business and High-End simulations were not good enough, the raw transfer rate results were certainly most useful. From the transfer rate results, you can see which hard drive has a higher transfer rate, and how areal density affects that performance metric. It also shot down the perception that a newer model is always faster."

Link : Hard Drive Performance Comparison Guide

[Arbie]

An ongoing comparison of hard drives (as well as CPUs) is a great idea and will have me coming back regularly.

I find that the biggest bottleneck in most of what I do is the hard drive, especially when un-RARing a number of big files simultaneously. My aging CPU is rarely even half loaded. I figure the disk is thrashing because it has to switch back and forth between tasks so often.

So... I am very interested in how well drives multitask, and hope you will add that to the basis stats you collect in this roundup. I believe the IPeak suite has a test for this. I don't now know whether Raid 0 will help me out enough in this regard to be worth it, but even comparisons on single drives (especially including the Hitachi DeskStars) will be of interest.

Thanks -

Arbie

[Zenphic]

Don't forget to add an accoustic/noise benchmark in future revisions of the article

[nearownkira]

maybe u can do a guide on choosing a good hard disk

[Dashken]

Ever wanted a guide on hard drive performance, where you can compare the performance of a wide range of hard drives? Well, we are not quite there yet, but that is our ultimate objective.

In this performance comparison guide, we will test and compare the performance of all the hard drives we can get our hands on. This is similar to what we are doing in the Intel Core 2 Processor Performance Comparison Guide.

In this revision, we have added the 100 GB Seagate Momentus 7200.1 mobile hard drive into the mix. Let's check it out.

Here's a quote from the guide :-

"WinBench 99 2.0 has proven that it can still serve as a consistent and reliable hard drive benchmark even in Windows Vista. It has given us a lot of interesting data. If the Business and High-End simulations were not good enough, the raw transfer rate results were certainly most useful. From the transfer rate results, you can see which hard drive has a higher transfer rate, and how areal density affects that performance metric. It also shot down the perception that a newer model is always faster."

Link : Hard Drive Performance Comparison Guide Rev. 1.1

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Arbie

An ongoing comparison of hard drives (as well as CPUs) is a great idea and will have me coming back regularly.

I find that the biggest bottleneck in most of what I do is the hard drive, especially when un-RARing a number of big files simultaneously. My aging CPU is rarely even half loaded. I figure the disk is thrashing because it has to switch back and forth between tasks so often.

So... I am very interested in how well drives multitask, and hope you will add that to the basis stats you collect in this roundup. I believe the IPeak suite has a test for this. I don't now know whether Raid 0 will help me out enough in this regard to be worth it, but even comparisons on single drives (especially including the Hitachi DeskStars) will be of interest.

Thanks -

Arbie

We will be adding IOMeter results soon. That should give us a good idea of how good the controller is.

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Zenphic

Don't forget to add an accoustic/noise benchmark in future revisions of the article

Hmm.. That would be kinda hard. We don't have the proper equipment for that.

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by nearownkira

maybe u can do a guide on choosing a good hard disk

Yeah, that's a good idea!

[Zenphic]

Originally Posted by Adrian Wong

Hmm.. That would be kinda hard. We don't have the proper equipment for that.

How about temperature? That's not an important thing to know, but it is interesting nonethless

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Zenphic

How about temperature? That's not an important thing to know, but it is interesting nonethless

Hard to do so, as we cannot maintain a steady ambient temperature. That's why we are currently concentrating on this as a Performance Comparison Guide.