Test Setup

ASUS P5WD2 Premium: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, All-In-Wonder X1900, Windows XP SP1.

Going up against the Barracuda 7200.10 will be the 500GB Barracuda 7200.9, and the 400GB 7200.8. We will also be adding the Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB hard drive to the test bed. We'll be testing single drive performance for all the hard drives, as well as RAID-0 with the 7200.10 and 7200.9 drives.

Testing software will consist of the following:

IPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit w/Business Winstone & Content Creation - Using Intel's IPEAK utility, we recorded all the IO operations needed in a typical run of Winstone 2004. We then played it back through IPEAK, averaging the scores of all the drives. This test is purely synthetic, but it will give us an idea of the drive's performance.

Multitasking with Business Winstone 2004 - Using a multitasking test included with the Winstone suite, which runs the test in the background while performing other tasks.

SYSMark 2004 Office - A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. For these tests, higher numbers are better.

Game level load tests w/Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004 - We'll be timing the load times of three games currently on the market. These results are real-world, and lower times are better.

File copies to internal IDE drive - We did a couple real-world tests, copying the contents of our UT2004 folder (~4GB) located on the test drives to an IDE Western Digital SE. Two tests were done where in one it's a straight copy from drive to drive, and the second test where we run a virus scan on the test drive while copying to simulate a load on it.

Business Winstone IPEAK

The Barracuda 7200.10 falls a little behind the other drives here, but it isn't too far behind the Barracuda 7200.9.

Content Creation IPEAK

All of the Seagate drives perform closely with one another, with the Western Digital holding the lead in our second IPEAK test.

Multitasking with Business Winstone 2004

The 7200.10 starts to flex some muscle in the multitasking test, and the denser platters and NCQ support probably influenced our final results.

Sysmark Office 2004

RAID benefits are pretty much zero in a straight Sysmark Office benchmark. Here the 7200.10 holds the lead, with the single drive outperforming the 7200.9 in RAID-0.

Sysmark Content Creation 2004

RAID plays a bigger role here as can be seen for both drives in Content Creation, but we wouldn't say RAID is mandatory for performance. The 7200.10 ties the Caviar in this test.