|
First Impression And Installation
Having been an IBM drive fan for the last 3 years or so, it was interesting to actually have a Seagate drive to test out. Will I be converted over? The drive I'm using to test is a 60 GB OEM model. The first thing that caught my eye is the drive construction. It's very solid and has a nice shiny finish to it. After inspecting the drive, I noticed that it indeed had internal padding to dampen the noise. After building a few computers, installing a hard drive wasn't really a big deal. My VP6 recognized the drive fine and I then proceeded to formatting and getting it ready for testing. After having it on for a bit, I noticed something I guess is a drawback to the drive being silent. The drive gets really hot, which might cause problems if you have a cramped case already. It ran considerably hotter than my IBM drives, but then it also ran a lot quieter... Now lets get down to some numbers...
Test Setup
I decided to get a variety of benchmarks together to see how the Barracuda does against the IDE RAID 0 on my VP6. As with every benchmark, this is just a relative measure of the performance of the Barracuda ATA-IV. Since every system will be different and the conditions will vary throughout, take these benchmarks as a reference point. My operating system of choice is Windows XP and I'm using NTFS for the file system. The latest drivers for the HPT370 IDE/RAID controller were installed before all the tests were run. Here's the breakdown of the test system.
- Dual Pentium III 1 Ghz
- Abit VP6
- 512 MB SDRAM
- Windows XP
- 2 x 30 GB IBM 75GXP in RAID 0 ATA/100 (7200 RPM)
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda ATA-IV (7200 RPM)
This should be a good comparison considering the IBM drives I have are both 7200 RPM drives with ATA/100 and the total capacity is the same as well. From what we know about RAID 0, the IBM drives should win against the single 60 GB Seagate drive. The benchmarks of choice are Winbench 99, CliBench Mk III, ATTO Disk Benchmark, and Sisoft Sandra. Winbench 99 is a good benchmark that uses some real world apps to measure performance. It's far from being perfect, but it'll give you some idea of how well the drive performs. The rest are pretty much just synthetic benchmarks so they don't necessarily translate into real life.
>> Winbench 99/CliBench MK III SMP 0.7.15
|
