SUMMARY: Today we are playing host to Western Digital's Raptor WD740GD 74.8GB Hard Drive which includes an impressive list of features such as 10,000 RPM, SATA connectivity and Command Tag Queuing and it is the fastest consumer level Hard Drive we've tested. We compare it against two Seagate 7,200 RPM PATA and SATA drives.
For our testing phase, we decided to compare the new Raptor with a couple of Seagate Barracuda 7200.7’s using the Intel ICH5R controller on an ABIT IC7 MAX3 motherboard. This is so you can get a reasonably good indication of how much faster it performs to that of more common desktop drives found in the majority of people’s systems at the moment. The two Seagate drives differ in that one is a slightly older 80GB PATA, and the other a newer 160GB SATA drive.
Now we move on to the test bed used for our benching activities.
Test System Setup
Motherboard: ABIT IC7 MAX3 Processor(s): Intel Pentium 4 3GHz (800MHz FSB with HT enabled) (Supplied by Intel) Memory: 2 x 256mb Mushkin PC4000 (Supplied by Mushkin) Video Card: GeCube Radeon 9800 XT 256MB (Supplied by Kingmax Technology) Operating System Used: Windows XP Professional SP1 Drivers Used: Intel INF 5.00.1012 Software Used: SiSoft Sandra 2004 and HDTach v2.70
We initially intended to provide more results using other various benching methods, but soon after came to realize that none of the other methods would allow us to demonstrate the direct performance characteristics of the drive without non-related factors coming into play such as hard drive fragmentation, CPU influenced tasks, etc. We feel that the two dedicated hard disk benchmarking utilities used here are enough to provide you with a clear perspective on the drive’s overall performance without being impacted by other irrelevant elements.
SiSoft Sandra 2004
SiSoft Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) 2004 is a synthetic windows benchmark that features different tests used to evaluate different PC subsystems.
Here is where it all comes together. The first bench is already showing us the Raptor’s sheer domination against the mainstream Seagate drives, coming in 25MB/sec faster than Seagate’s 160GB SATA drive for its buffered read test. As you can also clearly see here, the difference in performance between the SATA and PATA Seagate drives is negligible.
In this case, we actually see Seagate’s PATA drive slightly out-perform its SATA brother, but still struggles to come even remotely close to that of the Raptor.
The random read tests always bring hard drives down to their knees. Nonetheless, in this instance we still see the Raptor performing at double the speed the Seagate’s are capable of.
