Multitasking with Business Winstone 2004

The 16MB of cache helps the 7200.9 overtake the 7200.8 by a small margin. The single drive performance in fact matches the 7200.8's RAID-0 performance. As we've seen previously, NCQ enabled drives benefit most in this benchmark.

Sysmark Office 2004

RAID benefits are pretty much zero in a straight Sysmark Office benchmark. The extra cache does make up for the slightly higher access times giving the 7200.9 a slight victory here.

Sysmark Content Creation 2004

RAID plays a bigger role here as can be seen for both drives in Content Creation. The 7200.9 leads by a larger margin in this benchmark.

Doom 3 Load Test

Far Cry Load Test

Unreal Tournament 2004 Load Test

In the game load tests, one thing that is clear is that RAID-0 does not do much to speed up the loading of game levels. The results pretty much were all over the place. The only load where there was an obvious win was Doom 3, but otherwise either the extra cache made up for higher access times on the 7200.9, or neither the cache or access times played a role.