Hitachi vs. Western Digital vs. Seagate: A Battle of the Mammoths
by Purav Sanghani on December 2, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Real World Tests - Multitasking Performance
To provide a real world example of multitasking, we run Outlook and import 450MB of emails into an account. We then measure the time that it takes our benchmarking utility to zip a single 300MB file. To compare our results, we calculate the difference between the multitasked process and the single task file zip process.
To provide a real world example of multitasking, we run Outlook and import 450MB of emails into an account. We then measure the time that it takes our benchmarking utility to zip a single 300MB file. To compare our results, we calculate the difference between the multitasked process and the single task file zip process.
| Outlook + Zip a 300MB File Within Drive | |||
| Multitasked | File Zip Only | % Difference | |
| Seagate 7200.9 500GB, 16MB, 3.0GB/sec | 69.215 | 59.707 | 15.9% |
| Hitachi 7K500, 16MB, 3.0GB/sec | 70.512 | 62.156 | 13.4% |
| Western Digital WD1600JS | 69.25 | 61.443 | 12.7% |
The WD4000YR looks like it performs the best out of the three while running multiple tasks but only by a second or two. It zips a 300MB file while importing emails in Outlook about 12.7% slower than just performing the file zip operation on its own while the Hitachi and Seagate drives handle this task 13.4-15.9% slower.
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Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
I can understand mentioning AGP, but PCI? You gotta be kidding me... that bus is such a bottleneck. You dont even have to run PCI cards to find out, just stress all the on-board stuff on a feature rich mobo and you'll notice it too.
Cygni - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Which explains the rush from the mfts to get PCI-Ex cards out the door. :p Really, the only 2 cards that i can see benifiting from the PCI Express bus are high level RAID cards and gigabit ethernet... both of which are being fully integrated into southbridges anyway.Hikari - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
You said AGP and PCI, not AGP and PCIe. Obviously there isn't a lot of difference between the latter, but there is quite a bit of difference between the former.Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
They are integrated into southbridge and still utilize the PCI bus mostly. PCI bus aint only the slot you see on your mobo, you know..Anton74 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
High level RAID? A single PATA drive has an interface speed identical to that of the PCI bus (133MB/s) these days, all by itself. And then there's SATA with 150MB/s and 300MB/s interface speeds now. Not to mention the PCI bus is usually shared with a multitude of devices, all wanting some bandwidth.puffpio - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
It seems anomalous that the Western Digital Raptor 10000RPM drive is sooo much slower in the Doom 3 level load test compared to all the other drives. It sticks out like a sore thumb. It doesn't make sense because it had been dominating the other tests...