Today we say goodbye to
32-bit Windows as we convert another system to Windows Vista Ultimate
64-bit. The new test system we'll
be using today started out with the Antec Twelve Hundred case, then we
put in an 850 watt power supply from
PC Power &
Cooling. For the motherboard, we have switched to the ultra high tech
ASUS P5N64 WS Pro motherboard with the NVIDIA 790i Ultra SLI
chipset, which comes standard with integrated Marvell SAS RAID. For the
CPU we are using an Intel C2D E8400 processor and a HD 3870 video card
from Sapphire.
Here are
the specifics:
For
the bulk of the hard drive benchmarking I'll be using
Hard Drive Tach. HD Tach has proven very
reliable for us over the years and I like to stick with what works.
The following tests will be
conducted using the onboard Marvell SAS controller. I'll start out
with one hard drive and work our way up to the two drives running in
RAID 0.
Single Hard Drive Test Hard Drive Tach - 8MB Zones
Burst Speed:
186.2 MB/s
Average Read:
141.9 MB/s
Average Write:
98.8 MB/s
Right from the very
first benchmark I knew the Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 hard drive was
fast...and I mean FAST. That even includes our old SCSI 15K.3 Ultra 320
tests way back in April of 2003. Other than some minor experience with a
Fiber Channel server, this data transfer demonstration
is the fastest I have ever seen. And by the way, this is
a single hard drive, not a RAID array.
Let's
press on to the single drive 32Mb zone benchmark.
Single Hard Drive Test Hard Drive Tach - 32MB Zones
Burst Speed:
186.3 MB/s
Average Read:
142.4 MB/s
Average Write:
127.4 MB/s
Switching to 32MB Zones we see the performance
increasing to an incredible 186 MB/s burst, average read of 142 MB/s
and an average write of 127 MB/s. Very impressive...
Single Hard Drive Test HD
Tune: Read Only
I've never been a big fan of HD Tune, but even HD Tune shows some
incredibly impressive numbers. In the benchmark above, HD Tune is
showing us the minimum, maximum, and average hard transfer rate. It also
shows hard drive access time, burst rate and CPU usage. On the single
hard drive test, HD Tune shows the following information: