Test Setup

We will be running the tests with the MSI P35 Platinum Combo's ICHR9's SATA controller #1. The P35 Combo will be equipped with an Intel E6750 clocked at 2.66GHz, and 2GB of Corsair Dominator PC2-8500. A GeForce 8800GTX running ForceWare Release 169 will handle our video needs. Windows Vista Ultimate is the OS of choice, fully patched up to the time of testing.

Going up against the Barracuda 7200.11 will be the 750GB Barracuda 7200.10, and the Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB hard drive.

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 as well as being a bit dated, but it will give us an idea of the general 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.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex v170b2 was used to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

TMPGEnc 2.54 - We used an Animatrix file, titled The Second Renaissance Part 1, and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

DVD Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Photoshop CS2 Driver Heaven Test - Photoshop is perhaps the defacto standard when it comes to photo editing tools. Given that it is so popular, we incorporated DriverHeaven's latest test into our review process. Lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

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 Western Digital drive takes this one, but the Barracuda 7200.11 does improve on the 7200.10's performance.

Content Creation IPEAK

Similar results as the Business IPEAK tests. The 7200.11 doesn't catch the Caviar, but it is very close.

Multitasking with Business Winstone 2004

The Barracuda 7200.11 does very well in the multitasking test. The denser platters and NCQ support helped the 7200.10 previously, and Seagate's 11th generation drive improve upon this.

CDeX

There is a lot of hard drive crunching when encoding a wav file into MP3. The 7200.11 is easily the fastest drive of the three here.

TMPGEnc

Similar results as the CDeX tests. While these are CPU and memory dependent, a fast drive will keep data flowing along the chain.

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