The Test

Our test bed specs have been laid out below. We used Western Digital's 160GB 3.0 Gb/sec drive, since it was the quickest in our 3-way SATA 3.0Gb/sec Shootout.

Our test bed:

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz)
Giga-byte GA-K8NXP-SLI
Western Digital WD1600JS
NVIDIA 6600GT SLI Edition (single 128MB card )
1GB (512MBx2) Corsair XMS4400

Our motherboard is an nForce4 based board, which features support for the SATA II standard, up to 3.0 Gb/sec SATA transfer rates, and NCQ and TCQ.

We used the following nForce platform drivers in conjunction with our testbed:

nForce4 Chipset Driver 6.66
NVIDIA graphics driver 71.89
Windows XP SP2 w/out further updates

AnandTech Storage Tests
Business Winstone IPEAK a playback test of all of the IO operations that occur within Business Winstone 2004
Content Creation IPEAK a playback test of all of the IO operations that occur within Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004
Half-Life 2 Level Load Test Half-Life 2 level load time test
Doom 3 Level Load Test Doom 3 level load time test
Command & Conquer: Generals Level Load Test Command & Conquer: Generals level load time test
Real World File System Task Tests timed tests of basic file system tasks including zipping/unzipping and copying files
HDTach Synthetic test for transfer rate of hard disk during a full disk read
Service Time and Transfer Rate Tests Synthetic tests for average service time and transfer rate of hard disk during a full disk read
Business Winstone 2004 Multitasking Test Synthetic tests for overall system multitasking performance
Real World Multitasking Test timed tests of basic multitasking processes, timing a file zip operation while importing Outlook data

More details about each individual test will appear in the section of the review dedicated to that particular test.

Index Pure Hard Disk Performance - IPEAK
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  • Visual - Saturday, December 3, 2005 - link

    i cant imagine what error would hang my drive for 8 seconds :/ and if it really happened, even in recoverable error, i'd not trust that drive again anyway. so it'd be better to mark it "failed"
  • Lakeshow - Saturday, December 3, 2005 - link

    Yeah I read that article on storagereview.com couple days after I got my WD4000YR and it kind of bothers me.

    Oh well, what are you gonna do? I absolutely love this drive. I can only hope this drive will live until my next voluntary upgrade.
  • Lifted - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    The HD Tach screenshots say "for non-commercial or evaluation use only, see license agreement."

    Hmmmmm. Anandtech is non-commercial?
  • Gannon - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    I'd like to see more tests done on drives that are at least 80% full because a lot of us pack our drives full of stuff and the performance we end up getting is when we've filled it. While these tests are good and all, I think they inflate the actual scores of how a drive is really used. No drive sits with just XP and a game or two and a couple of test files, that bias's the tests toward unrealistic use of how hard disks are used, especially big ones over 160GB. I fill my drives regularly and I have over 800GB needless to say I'm backing up stuff to DVD's just to have enough space to perform other operations.
  • WileCoyote - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    Why does everyone want Anandtech to benchmark their current system? Run your own benchmark if you want to know the speed of your hard-drive/computer. I think the articles here are perfect - they help me decide what to purchase in the future. I don't need an article to make me feel good about what I already have. I like the current format of articles that educate me on my next purchase.
  • johnsonx - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    time to cut down on the pron addiction
  • Olaf van der Spek - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    > We were also surprised to see the WD4000YR perform so well, since it is using the 1 st generation 1.5Gb/sec interface.

    That's a joke, right?
    I hope you weren't really expecting a significant performance improvement from a faster interface (300 mbyte/s instead of 150 mbyte/s while HDD's are more near 75 mbyte/s and only during seqential access).
  • bob661 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    I think the interface increases benefit RAID performance more than singledrive performance.
  • Olaf van der Spek - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    I don't think so, as (without involvement of port multipliers) SATA is a point to point architecture.
  • yacoub - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link

    Or you can go buy a pair of 200GB Samsung SpinPoint SP2004C drives for under $100 each and have a much quieter drive setup. :)

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