|
Hardware |
Model |
|
Operating
System: |
Windows XP |
|
Motherboard:
|
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe |
|
CPU:
|
AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Socket 939 |
|
Video Card: |
ATi X1800XL |
|
Memory: |
2gb OCZ Gold GX XTC Edition
PC-4000 DDR
3-4-3-8 |
Testing:
For benchmarking the 7200.10 drives I will be
using HDTach 3 from
SimpliSoftware. For comparison, I will also be using
Sisoft's Sandra 2005 Sr2.
HDTach is a great free utility that allows benchmarking and drive
comparisons. Sandra is an industry leader in performance
tuning and benchmarking. A free Lite version can be found on
their website. For comparison, we will also fire up a Western
Digital Raptor 74 GB RAID 0 array and see how well the Seagate
drives look.
First I tested a single
7200.10:
As you can see from the above chart, we are
performing just under the rated 78 MB/s transfer rate at 66 MB/s and even getting
a pretty solid 9.8 ms random access time. The Average Write of
43 MB/s is respectable for any performance drive, more so for a 750
GB! It's also nice to
see a burst speed of 135.1 MB/s for those common short reads.
Next I created a RAID 0 array
with the nForce 4 Raid Array tool:
In the short test the performance jump
provided by a RAID 0 array is immediately visible. Our speeds
jump across the board with an Average read of 112.5 MB/s and a
Random Access Time of 14.3 ms. The Average Write speed
increases to 107.3 MB/s and, lets not forget the often quoted
Burst Speed with a huge jump to 192.5 MB/s. If you don't have
RAID 0 array running in your high performance box, this should be
all you need to see!
In the HDTach long test the RAID array does
even better on average banking in both a solid 115.7 MB/s Average Read
and a 106.7 MB/s Average Write with very little drop in both Random Access and Burst Speed numbers.
So we all know that Seagate Barracudas are the
king of storage size, but how do they stack up against the
industry's speed leaders? The answer may surprise you!
Using the stored RAID 0 data for my two WD Raptor 74GB drives as a
comparison we can see the Seagate 7200.10 bests the Raptors in
Sequential Read and Average Read.
Sure the Raptors can do 8.6 MS Random Access
speeds but can your Raptors do this?? That's 1.36 Terabytes in
RAID 0. Who's your Daddy now?
Click on
image for larger version
For a second opinion, I used Sandra to
benchmark the Seagate 750's against the top drives on the market for
speed all running in RAID, and for good measure I even used
Gigabytes hot new virtual
I-RAM drive. The results are again better that you would
expect. The 7200.10 drives finish third following behind the
Gigabyte I-RAM RAM drive and slightly behind a set of 36 GB Raptors
drives. Not to shabby for the king of storage size.
Conclusion:
The Seagate barracuda 7200.10 hard drive is
simply the best possible storage drive available today. Not only
has Seagate provided ground breaking storage capacity, they have
paired it with solid performance numbers nearly on the level with
the WD Raptor drives. Seagate as proven that you don't have to
sacrifice performance to get the storage you need today.
Seagate 7200.10 drives are also some of the quietest drives I have
tested as well. Ten years in the making and I just cant wait
to see what Seagate will do next. Can you imagine these drives
with the Cheetah 15K speed or even the throughput of the latest
Serial Attached SCSI technology? Look no further than Seagate
to make these parings a reality soon. With a 5-Year warranty
to back it all up, Seagate has become the must have storage leader
with the 7200.10 series.
Best Price:
$499.99 from Newegg
