Testing Methods

Our testing methods and benchmarks remain much the same from our previous series of storage tests.  We have included a large grouping of hard drive tests that most other sites can't match, including a couple of custom tests that we run here for some real world results. 

PCMark05 and WorldBench 5 are included to show standards-based real world benchmark results and how the drive differences will affect specific applications and application environments.  HDTach and HDTune are purely synthetic tests that stress the drives read/write/access capabilities to report back comparison numbers.  IOMeter is one of those aging, yet still very precise, professional benchmarks that we can use to compare different hard drive access patterns to see how a particular hard drive performs in a server, workstation or database environment.  Finally, yapt and the PCPer File Copy test show some real world performance of file creation (both large and small) and file copying across different partitions of the same drives.

System Setup

Memory 

Hard Drive

Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB WD7500AAKS
Western Digital Caviar SE 400GB WD4000KD
Western Digital Raptor X 150GB WD1500ADFD

Sound Card

none

Video Card

ATI Radeon X800 XL

Video Drivers

Catalyst 7.2

DirectX Version

DX9c

Operating System

Windows XP SP2

Our storage testing setup did change pretty dramatically this time though, so you'll notice we only have a few hard drives to report results for.  We moved to a new P35-based motherboard platform as the old 955X chipset was getting awfully long in the tooth.  The move to 4GB of memory is probably overkill, but as more and more users adopt that amount of RAM it only made sense to do it now here to future proof the setup as much as possible.