Testing:

     For testing we'll be using ClubOC's water cooled rig that started with Swiftech's Quiet Power P180 water cooled chassis. We then added the EVGA 680i motherboard, an Intel C2D E6700, Mushkin Extreme Performance XP2-8500 DDR2, and a pair of EVGA GeForce 7600GT video cards. Last we added the 2x 1Tb 7200.11 SATA Hard Drives.

     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. I'll also toss in a couple SiSoft Sandra & HD Tune hard drive tests as well. The following tests will be conducted using the EVGA 680i onboard SATA 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 (HD Tach)

     To establish a base line for the tests we start out with a single Seagate hard drive. A single hard drive on the EVGA 680i motherboard gave us pretty impressive results. The burst and average read speeds are right on the mark and the average write speed is much higher than we've seen on previous Barracuda 7200.10 drive tests.

Single Hard Drive Test (SiSoft Sandra) 

     The Sandra tests are a little harder to follow, yet another reason why we stick with HD Tach. The above chart compares our Seagate drive (IN RED), to 4 other hard drives, 2 of which are RAID arrays.

Single Hard Drive Test (HD Tune)

     Although I don't like it as much as HD Tach because it doesn't show write speed, HD Tune is another good hard drive benchmarking program that shows 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:

     As you can see, the average transfer rate or read speed is fairly close to that shown with Hard Drive Tach, however the burst rate is quite a ways off.